The End of The Beginning

Freshman year is over.  I am almost 19 years old, with only 3 years left of college.  Then I’ll be moving on to bigger and better things and starting my life on my own.  I remember the first day of 1^st grade like it was yesterday.  I was the first person to line up to go inside the school so my new teacher dubbed me the line leader for the year and I got to hold the 1^st Grade sign so everyone lined up behind me.  I felt so special, so mature.  Now, almost 15 years have passed since that day. 

I feel like my life is passing before my eyes, before I have a chance to catch it.  Maybe I’ve been spending so much of my time thinking about the future that when it actually comes, I barely have time to enjoy it.  Everything we do is supposedly in preparation for the future.  We study and get good grades in high school so that we get into the college we want, then we have to do well and be involved in college so that we get the jobs that we want, and then we have to find a husband or a wife that will take care of us in the future, and make enough money so we are stable in the future.  Why can’t we just enjoy the present?  Everything we’ve ever done has been leading up to this moment that we are in now, so why are we always thinking about the next one? 

The future scares me.  I barely have a grip on the present, how am I going to take care of my future?  I’m terrible with commitment, I’m terribly impulsive and never think things all the way through before making a decision.  Maybe that’s because I’m better at handling the consequences than the regret of making the wrong choice.  I like to make mistakes.  I’m good at making mistakes.  I’m used to making mistakes.  I believe that making mistakes is the only way to better yourself.  Because if you never do anything wrong, how do you know that you’re getting it right? 

I want to live a full life.  I read books about fabulously fascinating people who have done all thing crazy cool things with their lives and have gone on so many adventures.  People who have learned from their mistakes and have lived to tell the tale.  That’s the kind of person I want to be.  I love being spontaneous.  But sometimes I feel like I do things in my life just to say that I did them, just to have those stories in the future.  We live in a terribly fake age, where everything must be recorded and put on Facebook for the world to see or else it isn’t real.  We live in a world where nothing matters until other people see pictures or read about it online.  Our lives are so intertwined with the rest of the world it’s hard to sort out what is truly ours. Not even our own memories are truly our own.  We share those with everyone else too.

I know I’m just rambling now; there is no real point to any of this.  I just like to get my thoughts out.  I wonder if I’m the only person who thinks about these types of things, like life and the future and what we are doing in the world.  It’s incredibly hard to grasp.  I’m just trying to figure myself out.  I do a lot of really stupid things, but somehow I always seem to make it out okay.  I just hope that my luck won’t run out any time soon.