life is waiting for you.....

sometimes i draw the comparison between life and traveling somewhere you've never been before. on just about every vacation or visit to a strange town, there comes at least one moment where i am looking for a specific address, off ramp, landmark or building. i know it's coming up, i don't know exactly what it will look like, or how many streets come before it, but i've got a descent idea about what's coming. and sure enough, the street i needed to turn on showed up when i was convinced it was further down, or i looked so long for that stupid landmark that i actually forgot what i was looking for and drove right past it. sometimes i'm looking for an address that should be right here, right where it should be, but it's not and it makes no sense.

life brings these same problems. i can remember wanting to hurry through my late teens so that i could drink (legally) at 21 but i forgot to tell life that it was ok to slow down and take it's time right after that and now i wake up and i'm 31 and all of that drinking that i so badly needed to do just seems like a waste of money. or i put off writing even one damn word in the novel i'm working on because in two days is my day off and then i can just sit at the computer all day and type uninterrupted. (i wish there was a keystroke that instead of italicizing words, it would denote sarcasm!) but when i get to that day off, i forgot about going to the grocery store, and the bank, and i haven't worked out in 3 days and then i'm done with those things and all i want to do is sit on the couch and not have to think or do anything.

so i wait for this magical day that's always coming and before i know it, it's been a year and i've got the same three pages i started with plus a paragraph of forced labor, when if i would have just sat down for a few minutes each night, a few simple paragraphs even, i would have thousands of words by now.

a friend of mine once wrote about how she was always waiting for the real her to arrive and how in high school she thought she would "arrive" in college, and then it was when she got married, and then it was when she had a baby. eventually we all have to discover that when we finally become the real us is when we are done living. that's the sick and twisted beauty of the whole thing, we never become who we are, we are always becoming that person, nothing is static. we are always aging, learning, growing, thinking and changing.

the off ramps are always coming, the turns will always need to be made, but we aren't going to see them coming if we're going 100 mph with our heads turned in the opposite direction waiting for them to tap us on the shoulder and tell us they are near. we have to be aware. and we have to know that life is going to happen whether we tell it to or not, so live life as each turn comes, be ready for it, and only hit the gas once you're on the right road.






“Life is all about timing... the unreachable becomes reachable, the unavailable become available, the unattainable... attainable. Have the patience, wait it out It's all about timing.”
Stacey Charter

"the only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once"
albert einstein

and to wrap this up:

once, on a family trip when i was young and we had our first family camcorder, there is actually video of my dad telling my mom to video tape our upcoming exit that would lead us to the great state of florida and to that giant creepy mouse. the funny part is, the video is of my dad's hand in the frame pointing at the exit and you hear him tell her to video tape it....as we drove right on by.

that memory sometimes sums up my whole life, being aware of what to do, making sure that people know that I know what to do, and then i don't worry enough about what i'm doing.