Plus One

Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you.

I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last – such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they will blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

- The Picture of Dorian Gray,

   Oscar Wilde 

The day the people around me celebrate my aging of another year is fast approaching. And as my mother is thinking about what cake to bring home, I am fretting. I am most positively fretting.

Perhaps it is there is something about the number or something about this year or the fact that the big TWO will be here soon. Perhaps it is the way we have been viewing the world and ourselves. Perhaps it is me. But I doubt I am the only one who goes through this mini existential crisis at this point in life. I call it the omg-I’m-going-to-be-20-soon-what-have-I-done-with-my-life-what-am-I doing-now-what-will-happen-in-the-next-5-years-what-on-earth-have-I-been-doing-all-this-while period. Or more simply (and shortly) put, the Reaching Twenty phase. And I am pretty sure I’ll still be in this phase this time next year.

I don’t know if it gets better in the future because I haven’t been there yet but for now, there are just so many questions, so many answers (not necessarily to the questions being asked), and so many unknowns. There are questions with no answers and answers with no questions. There are also unknowns that we know and knowns that are unknown. Are you still following me?

The book currently being devoured is The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The man’s a genius. It’s the first time I feel the need to have a highlighter on hand as I read. Anyway, what he said struck a chord.

Right now is as young as I can be and the oldest I’ve ever been (did I say that right?). This age is only going to be my age for a year. The moment I enter adulthood, there’s no going back. I’m not going to be considered a youth ever again. I have to do something.

So, I decided that I am going to live.

In fact, I’m not going to just live. I’m going to live with love.

I hope you’ll consider taking this journey with me, or at least be a part of it. And I hope you decide to live too.

“For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.”

2 Timothy 1:7