I sometimes wish I wanted less out of life....well, maybe really not less but certainly not the more that I keep striving for...

I was in the grocery store this afternoon, and I noticed a row of eight-by-ten photographs on the front wall. One was of a young man who was the "meat manager." He was an attractive 30-something guy, and I wondered if he was happy in his job. I wondered if it gave him a certain satisfaction and if it provided him with enough income to raise a family...

The photograph made me think of all those people I know who are looking just for that good job and decent income in order to raise their families.

And how I keep looking for Something Else out of life. Something More...

It was for wanting Something More that I took that leap of faith and quit the "day job". It is for wanting Something More, and not getting it, that depresses me and makes me appear, to outsiders, like I'm sitting at my desk playing with pencils when I'm really like a snake--curled up, flicking out my tongue and tasting the air for something appropriate.

I'm like a dowser with a divining rod waiting for the slightest vibration to tell me I've struck water....

There are times when I realize my divining skills aren't all that good, and that I need to deveop them as much as I need to fashion my dowsing rod a bit better. There are, though, no Schools for Dowsers to learn the subtleties of the craft. And every Dowser will tell you that he, or she, learned the craft in his or her own way.

Dowsers who tell you they have a sure-fire method rarely acknowledge that their craft is, in part, helped by a good dose of luck. Sometimes a rather fortunate Dowser will pass his or her luck along--but it isn't in the platituteds and rah-rah speeches that help create football heroes.

Luck is passed along in strange ways. Unlike the secret Masonic handshake, it's not the kind of thing you teach someone who's one of The Elected.

So, I think a lot about what my life might be like if all I really wanted was a family of my own rather than this Something More of success that breaths down my neck like an asthmatic gorilla. It's not like I'm looking for the Pulitzer Prize though. Not like I'm seeking the Times Best Seller List. Although if either came along, and throw in an interview with Charlie Rose, I wouldn't be all that upset...and I'd make sure folks knew that it was just as much hard work that got me there as luck.

We often look at success cases and see their shiny happy families, or their upper crusty backgrounds. It's easy to notice the confidence in their grooming and their ease with the public. We rarely see the goofily nervous who smile funny, wear ill-fitting clothes, and drop inappropriate things on the floor in front of others.

Or is it that we don't acknowledge them as much, or quite the same, as their poised counterparts.

So I wonder what my life might have been like if I accepted being a housewife and married the butcher's son (as one of my boyfriends happened to be)...if I didn't want some mythical brass ring and want to be better than my family's dysfunctional morass. I wonder what it would be like if my mind and my heart and my soul didn't keep pushing me to ask questions, to confront others, to see the world in metaphors and similies and to write.

I wonder what it would be like to be simply content with a simpler life. . .