Sometimes it’s easy to believe times follows a logical progression, just as 1 leads to 2 leads to 3. Days will pass exactly like the previous one, each step following a pre-drawn path that has long lost its novelty. I let my motor abilities take control, guiding me through the hours steadily, feet one in front of the other, one in front of the other. There’s recklessness there, in the belief that nothing can possibly can go wrong. It’s a bit of faith I’ve dragged along with me through childhood. A becomes B becomes C. Night becomes day becomes night.
Most of my life will follow a routine. If you believed in Fate you could even say that this routine has already been determined by a supernatural hand. The lines I walk on have been walked on already by many others, wiser and nimbler than I. Surprisingly enough I feel no need to draw my own line yet. My sense of adventure lies dormant, waiting for a time when I’ll have both guts and funds enough to find my own way. I am more than willing to wait. There will always be a time, I tell myself.
In a way, I am submerged. I am aware of how stupid it is to believe that time follows logic as gravity does. Maybe, someday, there will be an event to throw me off my quiet path. But won’t even that be decided by time? I can wait for it. There is a time, a place, a person for everything.
Everyone I’ve ever known over the age of thirty instructs me to take advantage of my youth. They clasp their hands together, nostalgia transforming their facial expression, easing them into a soft, smooth smile. I usually admire the irony of situations, but I hate the irony in this. Teenagers stretching their limbs out, preparing for growth, wearing Iago’s heart on their sleeves. And people who would consider themselves old (but oh, how they avoid the word itself), glorifying those few days of childhood, feeding on them in their sleep, sinking into they like you would into a cool seabed.
I wish people would sit down and decide what is what. I wish people would solve life’s silly little inconsistencies. I wish adults wouldn’t look at me like I would someday realize what a failure life really is. I wish I could be given a manual as to how assemble life and get it functioning properly. I wish you’d stop telling me that I can’t do what I want to do, or the way I want to do it. This is a path to self-destruction? Maybe, but it is my path to self-destruction. And no, I regret nothing. I never regret anything.
I wish a lot of things. Most of them feel as slippery as dreams. But this, today and tomorrow and the next day, this right here, this is the real thing. It doesn’t get anymore real than this.
I live life this way because I want to ingrain deep into my brain exactly what these days are, what they are like, and not remember them any differently. I live life the way I want to, letting time carry me one way and then another. I live life this way because the passage of time is something I can put stock in, something as stable as the orbits of stars. I live my life like this because I don’t want to live it the way people tell me to. I live life this way because it’s mine and, if there’s one thing I can fight for, one thing to be totally possessive about, one thing I can write about to make me feel happy, to clear my mind (even if I don’t make sense), it is this.
“If you cannot find joy in peace in these very moments of sitting…you will be incapable of living the future when it has become the present. Joy and peace are the joy and peace present in this very hour of sitting. If you cannot find it here, you won’t find it anywhere. Don’t chase after your thoughts as a shadow runs after its object….Find joy and peace in this very moment.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
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