Well Hello!

So... this is forty something...
I'm not entirely sure how this happened but most days I pretty graciously accept it. I seem to have reached the forty something threshold of life.   I am not unhappy about my life at this point.  If I am honest my life slightly rocks.  Its not perfect.  Its not cracking the ideal scales in the popular delusion of Gen X/Y social media constructed commercial consumerist competitive "my home is oh-so-beautiful and my clothes are oh-so-fashionable and my 2.5 family is squeaky clean and oh-so-well-dressed and I drive a shiny new car and know all the hottest bands and I am really hip" kind of way.  Its not winning any "hey look at me with the wonderful life" awards...but nor does it suck.  I'm a mum, a lesbian, a buddhist, a sometimes aid worker, a friend, daughter and an ex-lover to some fairly great people.  I'm a relatively nice person, I think...or at least I try to be.  One of my ex's continues to refer to me as the nicest person she's ever known, so I guess I can't be too far off track with that one.  I have to admit that I am really still trying to work out what on earth I am doing with my life... and it's a exceedingly frustrating to have reached forty something with still no clear idea of just what it is that I "do".  This is a moan I've been carrying on with for several years now.  I'm no closer to an answer unless I accept that I'm just not one of those people who has an easy answer at parties when people ask the inevitable "and what do you do?" question... But actually I'm not so keen on parties and small talk with strangers so perhaps it is not so hard to accept.  So woe betide the person who I'm interested in actually answering, because its going to take a while to list the things that I have done, and in the end...you will be no closer to an answer to what I "do" and will probably be desperate for a glass refill.  I live in hope that someday this will change.
There are a lot of things in my life that I love....my awesome kid, my family, my home, my veggie patch, art, bocconcini, gluten free cakes that are not orange flavour and fairy lights are just a taste of the juices that fill my life with joyful eruptions of smiles.  
There are not many things in my life, beyond the general state of the world and the evil perpetuated by humanity, that make me unhappy.... Big picture, yeah, there is a lot of really crappy stuff in the world and I'm not always able to be comfortably numb. Buuuut on a day to day basis there is not so much that makes me sigh too deeply. 
There are however, a lot of things that, if I am honest, I could stand to do a whole lot better at in life. Recently a friend asked me "what is the one thing you really want to do before you die?"  It's a really awesome question, and one that I think would be fabulous to ask ourselves on an annual basis...or at least each time you tick off the one thing that you answered last time the question was asked.  When I was asked I had to think for a while.  Not because there isn't enough I want to do...oh no. My To Do list thrives in my head but must never ever be written down. It cannot be. It's too big.  It would suffocate me with its enormity. I would have to have a jolly big sit down to recover from the overdose of reality.  But what struck me is that out of alllll those things in my internal iCloud there was no particular thing that absolutely had to be done before I die.  Except one, which was not so much a thing but was more the fabric of the list itself.  
My answer was that one day, before I die, I want to be able to say that right now, right here, I am living the best life I can.   My life is full of compromises, of almosts and intentions. It's full of the shadows of the things that I know I probably should be doing but don't, not really, not properly.  Like a trail of crumbs that hint at the cake but never quite fill your mouth with sticky chocolate goodness, my path is strewn with the bits and bobs of partly fulfilled principles and pieces of passions.
So my bucket wish is to be able to stand in the scene of my life, even if only for a day, and consider it a well written play executed with aplomb.  I want to tick the boxes and, fully present in the moment, be able to be damn proud of what I "do" in my daily living.  I want to walk the walk, live the dream and be the change I want to see in the world.
Which of course is totally unacheivable with my current cacophonous racket of intentionality. 
So.... I need to first live up to the life theme I have been bantering about for the last few years... I need to simplify. 
And focus.
So thus this blog is born. This blog is my humble attempt to cultivate the art of living life as a forty something.  It's about living real, living simple, living according to the basic truths of how I think I should be living. It's about letting go of laziness, compromise and fear. It's about not being comfortably numb. It's about seizing the best me I can be, gripping on for dear life and sinking the boot into each day. 
So come along for the ride. I make no promises about where it will take us... But at the very least you may walk away with greater clarity about what not to do.  And at best...well, maybe with a seed of inspiration to add to the process of creating the picture of your own way of living.