I wasn't a kid that wanted to grow up super fast, but I did look forward to each step that gave me more freedom. I'm now in a place where I've got almost complete freedom from my childhood restrictions and quite often I find myself wondering about what this "adulting" thing is all about. The theme that seems to be the center of my focus lately, is the concept of time. There's never enough of it, and not only that...but where is it all going?
I remember sitting in elementary school and the time would go by so slow, even summertime seemed to last forever. I remember going back to school in the fall and feeling like it had been a century since I'd last been there. Now, I come back to school and it feels like it's been a week when it has actually been a couple months. Weeks flew by in no time at all in college, and post-college the time is flying by even faster. I wake up and go to bed at night feeling like I am barely keeping up with this lifestyle...
And then I wonder if others feel the same as I do. I feel like I'm chasing time. My to do list piles high and the minutes keep slipping away while I'm still trying to get the to do list from yesterday completed. I now understand the concept of a vacation and why people look forward to them so much. As a kid and teen I looked forward to vacations for the weather, but now I look forward to them for the chance to take a deep breath and reevaluate.
I am person that finds comfort in consistently "checking-in" with myself. I want to listen to what my heart is telling me, and evaluate how I'm feeling about my life and how it is playing out. To put it simply, that just doesn't happen when you try to be a successful person in today's world. My dad frequently says that he still feels like he's 22, and I completely understand why. He started working right out of college and never looked back. He's constantly running around getting work done and I imagine that he still feels 22 because that's the last time he ever really had the opportunity to "check-in". Now it's a couple decades later and you wonder where your life went.
I wonder at the end of this life if all the running around will have been worth it...or will we feel like we just listened to "the man" and never really accomplished what we wanted to? It's an unsettling thought and it leads me to question the American way of life quite frequently...because I know it's not the norm for every nation out there.
The way I see it, is that we are only given one life. Why is it that I have to work it away just to try and have the opportunity to enjoy it? We work for months on end and in return get one week of vacation. How is that ideal? My neighbor had a quote in his office that said "Don't be so busy making a living that you forget to make a life." That quote is the theme in my mind lately and I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with it...but what I do know is that I can't simply sit on the sidelines in this game we call life while the stopwatch keeps marching on.
