Life as a Grownup

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." - Henry David Thoreau

I've been looking through a bunch of college catalogs this past week, trying to figure out where I'd most like to transfer and spend the next 2-4 years of my life. Originally I wanted to go overseas, but I'm, well, less than fluent in pretty much all foreign languages, so I started researching all these different schools in England. I've started to realize though that my sudden yearning to travel to the U.K. is born more out of a desire to escape my current surroundings than any real desire to see the country itself. And I do too much running away as it is.

I have no idea what I want to do with my life. Well, I know what I want to do, but I don't know what I'm able to do. I've never thoroughly thought it through; I don't have any plans. I never really thought that any of my past actions would so dramatically affect my future life. I thought I had so much time. I thought I'd be a kid for what felt like forever and after that? Well, who cared, it was always too far off to warrant any real concern. Or so I thought, but now I have to do a million things at once, and I have to do them perfectly, and that still doesn't ensure my being able to live the kind of life that I really want. That scares me. I don't want my life to always be filled with disappointment, indecision; I don't want to end up working at some menial nothing job that I hate, making just barely enough money to support myself. I want my life to have purpose; I want to be satisfied with whatever I choose for myself, with the things I've chosen for myself in the past.

I guess from all this I've learned that there are some things you can't undo, and that the future is never as far off as we might believe it to be. You have to think beyond the moment... a lesson learned too late.