The missing and the finding...

The missing piece.   (Click the link here)

This little animation may just sum up a rather profound amount of the theme of my life...and perhaps it provides a context to what I think of as the Malaise of Generation X.  I think of the people I know my age, and so many of my dear ones seem to echo my theme... We search and search for the "thing"...the thing that will define us and make us whole. Maybe it's a person, a relationship, a child, maybe it's a job, maybe it's a home or a culture or a religion, a passion or a way of being in the world. We were raised to be acutely aware of the infinite possibilities before us, and of  our fundamental life-task...to choose the right path for us and follow it to reach our full potential in life.
As I reached my late 30s and early 40s it dawned on me that I've been searching searching searching for the "right choice"... Thinking I have found it but then...no... Always the slight misfit, the slight emptiness, the jar of a pointy edge where there "should" be smooth connection. And on goes the search.  It dawned on me that I may not find "the right thing" and maybe I'm going to have to find a way to be happy anyway...
Somewhere around the last year or so I have started to realise that the best likelihood is that my life is not going to be defined by finding the right choice for me.  At this point it is far more likely it will be defined by the search, the relentless search for meaning, than by that meaning found.
This little animation prompts me to think...perhaps this is the thing to be embraced.  Perhaps the issue is that when the piece is found, the search ends...and perhaps the greater meaning is in the experience of the search than in the finding.