Ramble

Sometimes I surprise myself with the stuff I come up with. I just went back and read through some of the thinking I did last year - papers which I made a point of transferring to my new computer so that I'd always have them a few clicks away. Anyway, it's all pretty fascinating. It took a lot to shape the final products of these papers, these records of my learning process. I wrote a page about what I think love is, and even though it might sound egotistical for me to say, I'm actually kind of amazed at what I wrote. One day I'll probably look at all of these things and see my 17 year old juvenile self, years and years behind in knowledge, but maybe I was actually pretty dead-on in expressing myself last year...

Anyway, that's a side note, I guess. What I've been thinking about is the future - well, when am I not thinking about the future. I spent the last 24 hours with my siblings, traveling to Pennsylvania to visit our grandmother and bring her back to our house for "Lasagna Sunday" - Christmas #2 with my mom's side of the family. We made a pit stop at my aunt's on the way back (my mom's sister). For most of the trip I was wondering what it would be like to live like this, out in the suburbs where a Friday night is spent in a shopping center because it's the most exciting thing for miles around. I think about what I want in this instant of my life - overwhelming exposure to the world beyond my front door - and get dumbstruck to think that this is the country I live in. There's nothing wrong with a suburban life, that's not what I'm saying, but am I going to be doing that one day? Will that be what I want in twenty years? I spend time either overcome by how much I have left to learn about life or afraid that one day I'll lose the desire to learn all of it. Weren't our parents the way we were at some point, unwilling to settle for a home life and prepared to see the world?

I know that everyone has to make choices about what they want. I guess here's where it ties together - last year I wrote about how love is about learning that other people need you more than your own hopes and dreams ever will. How does this compare to the fact that I've always been taught to go for what I want and let nothing stop me? Already I'm thinking about it in my head... if I want to be a surgeon, that's a lot of time lost for exploring the world... then again, I can't learn everything there is to know... if I was a doctor overseas, I would have to leave my family and would probably have little option to start my own... but then would I have a family at all if I was working as much as I would need to?

It's all far too much worrying for me to be doing at this point, because I'm sure what will be will find its way. But that also scares me - how much control to I have over it? Am I stupid to think I can accomplish everything?

I'm so tired of worrying about all of this. I'm doing it again - focusing more on the future than on the present tense. That drives me nuts. I then miss what's happening right in front of my face. And all this worrying makes me feel like I'm selfish for being so concerned about myself. I guess I have to learn that too, but I think learning selflessness is a right of passage for aging. You have to make those selfish mistakes the first time to learn not to do it again, to see what you miss out on when you're only focused on yourself. I think that's how our parents became who they are - they saw that their future lies in the hands of their children, not their own. It's just such a mess of being aware and unaware, of learning and succeeding and failing... It's ridiculous to try to pin a definition on life, since the topic itself is more daunting than anything imaginable. It's just a thousand things at once - it's happy, sad, love, hate, anger, passivity, satisfaction, frustration... everything. I just don't like when it's all those things at once - that's what really gets me at times. I can take it all in small doses, but maybe growing older is being able to live with it all at once, which is something we have no choice but to learn...