I feel as though I have hit a personal glass ceiling, the best way I can describe it is that I sleep walk through the vast majority of my life. I feel like I have occasional moments of lucidity where I am able to step back and look at my life objectively. At times like this I can recognize that I am putting in the absolute minimum amount of effort into nearly every aspect of my life: I am an okay father, a fair husband, a good employee, an average citizen. I am consistently slightly overweight and take decent personal care of myself (brush my teeth once or twice a day, shave twice a week, etc.) I have a good job but no sort of career or upward mobility. In short, I am dissatisfied with the direction, pace and lack of growth in my own life.

Yet the other 95% of the time I am completely unaware of these issues, I am perfectly content to live my middling lackluster existence. I set goals for myself and get myself motivated about making positive changes but within 2 weeks I am back to my same old ways, running around like a chicken with it’s head cut-off but never actually getting anywhere, never growing or changing. Objectively I don’t understand: where is my passion? Where is my drive? I find that I am among least motivated, least creative, laziest people I know… but I don’t know what to do about it.

My wife is virtually the exact opposite – she is the most vibrant and enthusiastic people I have ever encountered. For her, self monitoring is a way of life, she is constantly looking for ways to improve, to learn and grow. A professional artist, a teacher and the chair of a local human rights organization, she knows just how to drink from the cup of life. I have tried to emulate her, have asked her how she does it, but it is so natural to her that she does not understand how I can NOT be like that, cannot articulate what it is that she is doing differently beyond… just doing it.

I feel like a spectator in my own life, and so far the story is pretty drab. What do you do when your life-strategy seems to be stagnation, but you don’t know how to get out of your own head? How do you find the means to seize the day, when your only understanding of what that means is from observing it in others?