I imagine myself on my deathbed, looking back at the life I’ve lived, wishing with every fiber of my being that I could go back to when I was young, wishing I could change this very moment, and truly live for something. Now is my chance, I won’t get to go back.
We get around 80 or so years on this planet. It’s weird to think that I’ll be graduating from highschool in less than 2 months. I can’t help but feel like my life is moving so very fast. Before I know it, I’ll be in college. In 2 years I’ll be 20 years old, that’s a fourth of my life gone already!
I strive to be something more, to make something of myself, but then again doesn’t everyone? I want to live my life in a way that I will be proud of when my heart beats for the last time. It seems so far away, but before we know it we’ll be old, we’ll have wasted our youth and missed our chance to do something meaningful with our life.
I want to seize the day. In the quest of trying to make something of ourselves, we pursue fancy toys, money, sex, power, and knowledge. But these things will never satisfy the insatiable need for something more.
I’ve tried to pursue a few of these things, but the thing I’ve come to realize is, that everything has already been done before! The sun goes up, and it goes down, everyday. People live……and they die. What happens, will happen again. We think we discover new things, but in reality there’s nothing new on this earth, it’s the same old stuff. You can try to hold on to yesterday, but it will eventually fade away. Just like the things that happen tomorrow will fade away, never to be remembered.
It’s a hard fact to face, that everything in life, everything you could possible accomplish, has been done by someone else before. And no matter how much money you make or how famous you are, no matter what you do in life, it won’t matter in the end. You will die just like everyone else before you, and chances are, no one will ever remember who you were.
I have this desire to accomplish incredible things and to persevere through amazing challenges in my life. I dream of one day summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro. But while this would be an amazing personal feat, its has no significance at all in the grand scheme of things, and it’s been done by thousands of people before me.
I desire to write stories, to write and express my thoughts and passions, and to describe my experiences. But the truth is there aren’t that many truly original stories or experiences left out there. All the stories that people write are similar to stories that have been written before, and they all share common themes that repeat throughout history for ages. And no matter how crazy of an experience you think you’ve had, chances are someone has already had a very similar experience. Really, “New ideas” are very rare.
A close friend of mine once said, “ Sometimes it feels like all the deep thoughts and emotional passion in our hearts are already out in words, thought by other people. Like all the originality is gone, and theres nothing left to think because our heart’s thoughts have been thought by more capable people who word them in the most beautiful ways. Whats left for us?”
That hit me hard. So what IS left for us? There is no originality left…nothing truly new. If everything fades and is worthless in the end, what in life really matters? What is worth living for?
To me, it’s about doing crazy dumb things, making memories with the people I love. It’s about building relationships with our families, our friends, and also with God. It’s about investing in people, spending time experiencing life’s adventures together, and also enduring its hardships together too! Hard times have a way of bringing people together. And persisting through these challenges forms unbreakable friendships.
In the end, I don’t think its about a number. Its not so much about how many so called friends you had, so much as its about having people in your life that you truly love and invest in. And that truly love and invest in you!
All I know is that God built me for adventure. I have this unextinguishable need to GO! To travel the world, to make a difference, and to live for something more. I have the need to fight and and stand for something, rather than stay at home enjoying the luxury and ease of everyday life, sinking further and further into boring normal routine…into the background, entirely numb.
No, I’d much rather take some risks in my life and do some crazy things. What good is it living to be a 100 if you never get the chance to truly live at all? Honestly, I’d rather die young if it meant that I got the opportunity to live my life to the fullest.
It’s like Abraham Lincoln said, “In the end it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
