Is It Time for an Overhaul?

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Today’s the day – yep, it’s life overhaul time.

And no, it’s not an impulsive or spontaneous decision. Frankly it’s been churning through my head for years. I’ve read about it, reflected on it and practiced at it (that’s another way of explaining failed attempts) – since college – turning 21 – having a baby – burying a sister – having another baby – building a house – turning 40…

All these events in my life, and more, that I’ve thought, this is it. Now my life will change. Now I will… Do all the things that I keep dreaming about: start exercising, get organized, go back to school, plant a garden, write a book, lose 20 pounds and on and on.

But none of that has happened.

Oh, I’ve done things. I handle those emergencies as they pop up. At least until they aren’t critical and I can ignore them again and get anesthetized in a book or TV show.

Otherwise I’ve lived passively, taking things as they coming, drifting.

You don’t get where you want to go by drifting though. Yes, you get somewhere and sometimes it can be good and you think, this is cool but I wanted to go here.

Guess the auto/road metaphor is going to come into play.

If I’m the car and my life is a road, then drifting is a lot like driving without a map. Sometimes you find some gems just taking a drive and sometimes you get where you want to be through dumb luck but mostly you drive through industrial parks, or down streets where people leave old cars and refrigerators in the front yard or, even worse, you find yourself in some slum during a gang war. Any way you’re not where you want to be.

Drifting is easy however. It doesn’t take much energy or thought. It can be pleasant. It can be numbing – which is good for when you don’t want to face all the negative aspects of drifting.

For me, drifting is grey and filled with guilt and anxiety. I’m stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere, alone and without a map.

Well, I’ve had enough! I want to travel the scenic routes. I want to plan my itineraries, get where I’m going and stop driving in circles.

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I did a Google search on the definition of overhaul and found this rather fitting definition among all the ones that I expected:

overhaul: to dismantle the thing; and to reassemble it after reconditioning or replacing its components so that the useful life of the thing is comparable to its useful life when it was new.

To paraphrase and mix it with my metaphor: It’s time to take apart my life, examine it, repair the worn out bits, replace the not-working bits and put myself back together, refreshed and shiny once more.  

Overhaulin’ is about fixin’ what ain’t working and keepin’ what is. 

It’s easy enough for me to run down a list of what isn’t working in my life. I dwell on that topic enough to drive myself blue and whiny daily, but there’s a lot of good in my life as well – a lot – and, for a twist, I’m going to start this overhaul somewhere far more positive: what’s the good in my life? what’s worth keeping? 

The “whole” of me is far greater than the “parts” and the “parts” are infinite. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. If I’m going to take apart my life, I need to know what parts make up the whole of me. The “parts” are going to have to be pretty broad in category. I know once I start looking at these parts or categories I’ll see ways of breaking them down further and further, but I don’t want to get bogged down in minutiae. So I need to define the parts of my life specific enough to be able to determine concrete changes for them, but broad enough to encompass the majority of my life.

I’ve got some thinking to do.