Living with Future Retrospection

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
"This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it."

From this article on The Guardian's website.

This evening, I was cleaning the bar and chatting with a new friend and evening regular, Dan. We ended up talking about ages, because he keeps referring to himself as if he were a hideously old man (all of 31 eons- I mean years old) but he joked that people usually think he's twelve. I, on the other hand, frequently get an older approximation, anywhere from two to five years beyond my age. Age is a funny thing. Sometimes it's meaningless, and sometimes it means everything.

In the course of the aforementioned conversation, I touched on something that has been bothering me lately, and it's exactly what the palliative care nurse was talking about when she spoke of unfulfilled dreams. I know I'm fairly young, and I've lived so little of my life, but I feel like I am at a pivotal point. Up until now, most of my commitments have been rash, spur of the moment things dictated by circumstance and opportunity. But at last, I have certain possibilities open to me that involve discipline, sacrifice, and a longstanding commitment (I'm talking about college here, before rumors get started). My first response was pretty pathetic: I had my selfish little fetal position pity party. But eventually my second wind caught up to me. In some ways, it can be hard to give up the security and the comforts that we cling to because, quite simply, they are pleasant. They are even good, in all of their God-ordained glory. But they are also not all there is to life. And so we suffer little in the present so that we might attain much in the future. It is invigorating to be called thus higher.

Something there is that does not love to live ordinary. I can't do it. God, not yet. Please, not ever. I want so much more than this, even though it freaks me out to ask You for anything bigger than what I have. Let's do this thing.