Saturday 5 May 2012

Fast-Forward, Pause and Rewind



destiny.jpg
Fast forward ten years from now to kids, a mortgage, life insurance and a crossover vehicle with frustrating car seats that you can never get to close. Now twenty years: teenagers, marital challenges, career changes and a handful of what if questions. Is this what we wanted? Is this it? If happiness really is what we make of life and how we see the world, all perception, then does that mean action too? Does that mean we should make drastic changes in our lives so that we can see how good we had it, or does it mean acceptance of what we do have, here and now, our partners, careers, homes and other life choices?  Some one once said, “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.” So why then is life so scary, I think, “there is nothing to fear but life itself.” These are scary times (and I don’t mean that we are living in a scary period of time historically speaking) I mean the time between the age of 25 and 30. So many major life decisions are being made at such a rapid pace that I can hardly keep up with them; I’m missing the details because they 
are too hard to see. Everything is macroscopic and the small stuff, that I love, that I think we all love, is getting pushed aside and that itself is scary, because those details are what makes us who we are.
            Today I decided to stop. I stopped marking students’ work, planning up coming units or even the lessons I need for next week, I did not make wedding plans, or look at interior decorating ideas for our new house. I had to stop, because my mind and my body were so angry with me that I had to listen and stop. We tend to get so wrapped up in the comings and goings of our lives that we leave so little room to stop, breathe and reflect. Another great person said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates had something here, its not that we need to be re-hashers and think, reflect and pine over every decision we make. Or that life without question is a problem, but rather that we might understand ourselves a little better if we listen to ourselves, stop and take a moment once in a while to think about where we are at and where we’ve been so that we can have a better understanding of where we might be going and what it all means.
            Life has thrown me a few curveballs so far and I’m not upset about them, nor do I regret what I’ve done and who I’ve become. I think this piece would sound a little different if I was regretting my choices; it’s just that I see things a little differently now. I see people a little  differently then I used to, but I’ve passed the point of “bitter distain for humanity” and have started to accept that we (humans) are flawed, make mistakes, hurt each other and even that some of us are just plain spoiled (like the apples, not in terms of overindulgence). So what now? I’m ok with all of these things, even the spoiled people, but there is still so much more. I guess at this point there is much more to look forward to and then to one day look back on, hopefully with a simile. The sun came out today even though the forecast called for thunderstorms, life’s funny like that