Fingers Crossed

Perhaps this will carry on and become a regular catharsis of my thoughts or perhaps it will not.  In any case, I am writing today to state that I am 22 months and 3 weeks away from paying off the mortgage on my rental property.

On the very same day that I clear the principle amount of the loan I will immediately become financially independent.  That will be just over ten years from the start of the mortgage and while I do not know everything that will come to me in the next two or even twenty years, I can say the life of this mortgage has been the worst ten years of my life.  I need not enumerate all the peaks and valleys, the paradise lost, the physical challenges, or even the paralyzing depression I have suffered and do suffer this very day.  On the other hand, it may well be a decade of highlights including the accomplishments of financial independence, a daughter, space flights, and an entirely new understanding of the world.  I will revisit this at the true expiration of the ten years.

In the mean time, and I am still in the mean time, I struggle to function at work.  The entire structure of work is leaning as it always has but ever more so in the direction of those who talk rather than those who do.  There is a lack of leadership which causes too much self-directed 'work' and group decision making (or not), the thinking of which physically makes me ill.  I have no confidence that I can repeat my previous performance and I feel all the responsibility but have no authority to steer the bus and the services my group is supposed to provide are all going to pot at this very moment.  I had such high hopes for the future of manned space exploration.  We were going to colonize Mars!  Then I realized how the world worked (everyone fighting like cats in a bag), which causes a lot of movement but leads to no ultimate change.  I attribute this to a lack of leadership and vision.  This is the present state of things 'at the office', and I want out, now. 

Although, I did not begin this blog post with an idea of griping about work.  I am writing as a wish, a hope, a prayer that I will be able to make it through to the end of this hellish tunnel called modern life and into another phase of existence called financial independence.  I realize after the past two years that the decay rate of my own creativity and my own soul, even, is exponentially increasing.  I noticed in college that my creative writing and artistic abilities were shrinking as I crammed for my engineering courses and always assumed it would come back when I had more time but it seems the time has gotten away from me again.  

Fingers Crossed.