Life seems to take form as a specific linear pattern that we follow regardless of the pathway we’d really like to take. Any twenty year old could tell you that there’s this constant mental battle between wanting to go out and find some outstanding job and making a name for yourself, and wanting to go to your parents house and lay in your old room watching reruns of whatever cartoon until you eventually grew old and greyed and the rest of your adult life and responsibility had slipped away from you completely.
Yet, we beat on.
There’s a constant choice to either make some dramatic leap-the next big step is always around the corner once you hit your twenties-or to hold yourself back because you don’t really feel ready to move onto the next step. This space between whatever maturity level your peers think you should be at and the one you’re currently ready to be at feels vast and blank and all-consuming. How do we go to wherever life wants us to be if we’re not ready to be there yet?
The same can be said for feeling as though you’re ahead of the path that life has set for you. Maybe you ran up the road too far from your friends and now you’re dragging your feet waiting for them to catch up and they never quite seem to get the hint.
There’s this contant battle of rushing to get to where you want to go but also trying to enjoy as much of whatever moment you’re in as you possibly can and the balance of both is nearly impossible; how can you get where you’re going if you’re trying to be in the moment. If you’re always living in the presence sure you’re enjoying what is going on around you now, but how do you get anywhere else?
It all starts with a moment; you’re listening to a song over and over again and you can’t quite figure out why, but no other song really seems to fit you quite right right now. This is the one that you need to listen to. No other song makes sense. And you slow down to pick up what the song means and why it means so much to you, and the lyrics start to build this picture of what you found and how you were when you were young, and you start to realize that now in this moment you have so much more fear of the world than you did when you were young.
In this moment, being present makes you realize that you lost the bits of hope and belief and joy that made the world so vibrant when you were so young, and you wonder if that’s just how it’s going to be for the rest of life. When do you find those moments of joy again? And they’ll be there, eventually you’ll find them, and you’ll appreciate them so much more than you did when you were 3, than when you were 5, than when you were 12, and so much more than that 16 year old girl who thought the world was some kind of joke.
Because you could be stuck on this constant fact that the past seems so much more idealistic now than it did before, but that’s not going to get you anywhere or take you any closer to where you want to go than you are now. You can either be stuck on the past, on the present, on the future, or on yourself and who you want to be. When time is so relative, and being is so relative why don’t you focus more on finding the bits of joy in the smallest moments of life instead of trying to find where you should find moments of joy. Don’t just live in the moment, make the moments livable.
It’s too easy to let this world get the best of you. It’s too easy to be afraid, it’s more difficult to not be afraid anymore. When you’re young you look at the road ahead of you through rose colored glasses, and everything seems so full of possibility; at what point do we lose that?
At what point when we’re growing up do we become jaded and at what point do we start to think that the future isn’t as broad and incredible as we had made it seem. When do you stop wanting to be a princess, or president, or a superhero. Is this the point when we think that we can’t anymore, or when someone tells us you need to be realistic.
Maybe being realistic is the problem. Maybe we should trust the hope instead, and stop trying to be realistic. Maybe you need to think that you can do and be anything always, because there’s never a point in your life where when someone tells you you can’t you can’t say ‘fuck the odds, watch me.’