Every day is a battle.

A battle between fight or flight. A battle between positive and negative interpretation.

One of the things I've learned over the years is that happiness and unhappiness are largely chemical states in the brain.  Things like money and material wealth don't help with happiness. They can, at best, limit the number of negative vectors. That is, decrease the number of things that can cause stress.

But the clever mind can always find new things to work with.  If I am working I am regretting I'm not spending more time with my kids. They're little guys for just such a short amount of time. The oldest one just wants to be with me. He's 9 years old and simply wants to be with his daddy. Much much longer will that be? The hour glass is running out.  The 6 year old just wants me to play with him and see what he's doing.  Tick tock tick tock.

If I'm spending my time with them, I think of all the things at work I should be doing. All the people who count on me. Because I've discovered something over the last couple of years -- I am pretty good at something in particular after all, I'm really good at putting together pieces of things that when combined generate a lot of economic activity. And by really good I mean irreplaceably good.  So I worry that when I'm doing doing what I do best, I'm potentially costing other people their livelyhoods. People with families and responsibilities. And there's no easy solution to that. There's no "have other people do" what I do because few people have the peculiar combination of skills necessary to do what I do. And those that do have their own companies already.

But it's an endless rabbit hole. When you're "young" -- less than 30 anyway, you don't even recognize that youth will end. I certainly didn't. Then, sometime in the early 30s, for me it was 32, you start to hear a faint tick tock.  Maybe that's where women get the "biological" clock thing from. I don't know.  But I do know that it was around then I could start looking at the horizon and seeing that the sun is actually not going to stay at its noon mark forever.

That's when I realize I haven't done all the things I want to do and that many of those things are best experienced while at the fullness of health and energy. While I'm "at my prime" so to speak.  Adventure. Travel.

When I was in college and first dating my wife, I used to talk about getting a big old truck like my dad had and just driving across the country. No maps. No time constraints. Just drive and see the country.  Over a decade later, still haven't done that. I have a good laundry list of places I'd lke to go. But the other factors of life pull me in. The other compromises one makes that is a rite of passage in becoming an adult.

And so, late at night, when it's very quiet, the driving forces push against the obstacles. Most people won't understand what I am talking about -- which I say good because there are some things not worth understanding.  But those who do can nod with appreciation of the feeling.  The desire for solutions to problems that can't be solved, only managed. The recognition that for many decisions it isn't the choice that brings joy and fulfillment but rather the choices that result in the fewest regrets and disappointment. Or at least, a pathway to fewer sentence fragments.