The Indelible Journey of Life

Life isn’t a competition where we either win or lose. It is instead a race against ourselves, past, present, and possibly future, all at the same time, in a scenario that means we always tie and no one goes home completely satisfied. But yeah. That’s life.

From the moment we’re born we have this need to prove ourselves to ourselves, to others, and to the ideal. It is our gift and our curse because while we strive to be our full selves we also fight to be acknowledged by others who are also fighting to be their full selves. We can’t all realize that potential so either we get jealous or they do, creating an animosity born of failure and stunted emotional growth. It will eat us alive if we let it.

Then we have children and they are at the same time extensions of us and completely new creations with their own sense of self, of their place in this world, and of what they’re willing to do to cement that place once they’ve found it. They need us for guidance but they also need to be given space, a room of their own in which to grow and transform into the people they wish to be in time. Because time is the great revealer, whether or not we actually want to be revealed.

And we age out of those young stallions ready to roam, to explore, and to reevaluate. We grow into the mature versions of ourselves that we always thought we could avoid. Until we could no longer avoid them because they are now us, in our blood as surely as a virus, infecting us from the inside out. After all, that’s life. We live, we dream our dreams, we rage against the dying of the light. But it dies anyway, while our backs were turned and we thought we were safe from it.

Then, at the very end, we finally see that life is merely a collection of memories, some good, some bad, and some indifferent, a brief journey that leaves imprints on everything and everyone we touch. It was never about us anyway, but simply about the effects of our actions on others and on our environment. And when we finally realize this it’s too late to inform others of its magnitude. We just close our eyes and breathe it in, like so much medicine, and it cleanses us from within.

Yeah. That’s life.

Sam