Daring to Live

Sometimes life comes at you so fast that you don't realize what has hit you until the "tornado" has passed. All of us are so vulnerable and, even though we don't like to admit it, fragile. When we are young we think we have all the time in the world and so we squander it - thinking that "soon" or "someday" we'll do whatever our passion is. In our youth we also make a lot of mistakes - some of us more than others. Mistakes that keep us imprisoned to the point that we lose sight of what we are on this earth for, we lose sight of our dreams. I have a friend who finds herself with the responsibility of raising two children alone. She got pregnant before she finished college and now is having one heck of a time finding a job that pays enough and the time to go back to school to get that much needed degree. She is depressed, has given up on herself and doesn't know how to proceed. Then there are the friends who have burdened themselves financially because they wanted it all right away and couldn't wait until they could comfortably afford what it was that they thought they just had to have. I often wonder what would happen if we could just turn our thinking around. What if we could go to that place within ourselves and mine what it is that we truly desire. What if we discover what our talents really are? How would we live then? What would be different? What if we truly followed our hearts, our own sense of right and wrong? What if we could just put aside our fear of not meeting everyone else's expectations and followed our own personal path? If we could free ourselves from the entanglements of what we think others want from us or what we think others expect from us - how would we live? What if we followed what we knew - what we discovered as truth within our own souls? I don't know, but my gut tells me that we would have a community of people who were living authentic lives, who would find their fulfillment in living a life that used all of their talents and abilities. Maybe then we would see the wisdom of making better decisions for ourselves and how, by doing that, we would be contributing in a positive way to our community, to society as a whole. What if we dared to truly live and not just go through the motions of existing . . . . I'm just wondering . . .