I Want To Live
When people say they want to live life to the fullest, sometimes I wonder what the definition of that may be. Is it having a nice home, with cute kids, and husband or wife and a family to call your own? Is it the smell of fresh rain in the summer as you stand on your front porch watching the gray world contrast with vibrant shades of emerald green? For someone maybe life is simply having their happily ever after, and never having to be alone. I want to know what's life, because I want so desperately to live it to the full.
I want to wake up in the morning and watch the sunrise from the back of a beat up Volts Wagon van, with daisies in the window. I want to take off with nothing but me, myself and my camera, to hike mountains to places nobody's been, see beauty that steals your breathe away its so stunning, find hidden waterfalls, skinny dip, smell like campfires, stargaze almost every night, build family wherever I go, never to be afraid, to get tattoo(s), travel across america, to learn to play the guitar like a boss, to capture moments in frozen photographs forever, to dance like nobody else in the world matters but me and God, and have no expectations or agendas other than to live and love and be. I want to be an adventurer... I want to travel the world, experience different cultures, see the myriad of colors in the lives around me, view life with different lenses, taste the flavors, and be immersed in it all. I want to stop caring and stop wondering about the little worries in life. I want to fall in love and have the freedom to be me, wholly and fully without holding back. I want to live in Africa and China, and give love to people who never experienced true love before. I want to share hope and light and truth with my life. I want the world to see what real love looks like.
This is my dream. This is the life I want to live and the things I want to experience. It may be idealistic, and maybe it wouldn't turn out perfect, but I wont stop pursuing it.
When I was a kid, my dad would hold these "family meetings," where we would talk about life and plans for the future. I remember sometimes they would be so arduous and agonizingly long to sit through, but they were overall quality time with my family. Once he had my siblings, my mom and I sit down in a triangle of pillows on our living room floor as he excitedly told us to imagine that we were looking out at the ocean and this triangle of pillows was a jacuzzi. In my head I groaned thinking this was silly, and my delusional dad was off dreaming again. But he never let go. And one day we were sitting in that jacuzzi, looking out at the ocean on a beach in Mexico with a million dollar home my dad designed behind us. Does my dad have bank? No. Did we get to keep the home forever? no, eventually we sold it, but we got years of enjoyment out of it, lifelong memories, got to learn the culture, and had some amazing times. It blessed so many people who got to stay there. And so when I look at that, it taught me one of the most concrete lessons of my life, that you can do anything and dreams do come true. My dad was paralyzed from the waist down and told he could never walk again. Today he lifts rocks, walks, runs, and does everything anybody else can do with absolutely zero evidence of his accident. Right now he just finished building his home that he spent months after months working on, collecting rocks for the walls and designing it. He would go out every weekend, aside from his regular work and spend hours hauling hand-picked rocks he'd found to put in the house. He built a garden. It is beautiful. He did that--he imagined it, he picked his dream spot to spend the rest of his life and he did it. So who's to say I cant?