What I Want From This Life

Sometimes I think we just get caught up. We lose sight of the things we know we want, and, feeling helpless, we decide to give up. We forget the dreams and passions and submit to that which we swore we never would. I keep asking myself what it is I want from this life. What do I want to know forever? What do I want left behind when I am no longer here? What can people say I learned?

This life is so many things and I want to say there is and always will be only two sides to everything but experience continues to prove me otherwise. If anything has been learned, it is this: things will always be painted in only the colors you allow them to. 

I always thought it was just me who craved to be on top of the world. To have a globe of people beneath me and the power to say I did what was needed in order to get what I wanted. I didn’t realize until just now the desire I had was only the deadliest. The bottom of the cryptic code we’re meant to solve in this life.

Nothing matters or will matter in the end if I have not loved with everything inside of me. 

I don’t want power. In fact, life proves over and over again that along with money, power the root of all evil. So instead, I want what counts — and I’m not saying what counts for the rest of the population, but what actually does for me. 

I have lived nowhere close to where I should have and I know this because there are so many things I want. Like things to have, things people should know, things I should know, and things to change from. 

I want to get lost in more than just my head and heart. I want to get lost in parks and oceans that force me to tread the waters known as endless possibilities. Because this is what life is, an infinite number of chances that scream to have hope in something more than security because if we’re being completely honest, there is no such thing. Nothing is promised, not even this moment. 

I want people to know the pictures they see and the words I call mine are not enough to even come close to knowing me. I merely exist in the margins of books on the shelves found in the room next to mine. The story called “ME” isn’t in one of my moleskins but hidden between the underlines and asterisks in the books I have read. That the astonishing words I believe in are never my own but instead the ones I read from others that make more than just my heart go giddy up. I learned how to fall asleep to only poetic justice. So I am one of those helpless souls that live mainly through the stories I find in anthologies older than I am and books from all centuries of notions we call time. But I’m no lost cause. I take the stories with me to stay forever finding my own. So the world gets my end results, when all I see is everything just learning how to finally begin.

I want the world to know there is so much more to this life than the luxuries we’re blinded by. That wealth is necessary, but excessiveness is not. The goal shouldn’t be glass houses with mountain views. It should be character, love, health, and gratitude. I want to know that sincerity is enough. That it means more than anything else because if I have nothing, I have my word and it’s something I should cherish more than anything else. So I’ll be sincere with everything I have, even if it isn’t pretty. After all, the world promises me nothing more to have.

I need to know there’s more to life than fancy dinners and expensive estates. That a car’s purpose isn’t to be the cost of a home but to get me from point A to point B. That my worth was defined not by the number in my bank account but the number of experiences I allowed myself to endure. It is so easy to get lost in material things in a material world that nine out of ten times, we let the greed take charges the heart never wants. So I want to make moments count more than prices do because the cost will always be a part of me and a majority of the time, it isn’t something I ever want to lose. 

I want to know the clothes on my back are enough that I am who I am, and if I don’t make it to the picture I envision, alone, I am enough. Because this is what I’m doing, the thing we’re all supposed to be doing. I am chasing with everything inside of me the dreams I can never let go of. So I’m risking by rejecting conformity. We are meant to chase the vision, never money or people. Money promises you nothing but vanity and people cannot be saved. Trust me, I have tried. So I need to know that I’m enough because there is more than a greater chance that I will fail and be left with nothing but my dignity and a mediocre job. The world doesn’t tell us this is enough when it’s really all we need. All any of us will ever need. A chance at happiness with enough room for everything but regret.

So I’ll get lost religiously like it’s the primary purpose of this thing called my life. I will find myself in the snow angels I make in the winter, the summer lakes my boat finds itself breathing in, the colors nature gives us in the gall, and the special rain that belongs only to spring’s showers. Getting lost was indeed a gift begging us to find ourselves in more than just this taking over of life. Surviving was only the first step of making it through this world, living was next. 

When we survive, we only gloat in the light and dark. Living requires the bleeding of all colors, especially those of the unknown. So love and let love always be everything to the nothing we need. Pour out all you have because love is meant to be given and my god, is it enough. Maybe it won’t be accepted or even acknowledged and it will hurt like hell when you’re left with nothing but the scars we call memories that always bleed a little more each time we’re reminded of how difficult they are to heal. But we have to remember, this is the point. To love and to lose, to break, and to fall. Then to get back up again. We just have to remember the key to everything that’s meant to be a lesson: to get back up because falling is inevitable and staying there is easy. But this is life, getting up and cleaning off the dirt, taking only what we need to admit we have set our bars far from close to where it is we actually get to succeed. We can’t stop or nowhere is where we’ll end up. Why have the world as our playground if there are no slides we are willing to fall down from? We must embrace the tears, and the hurt we are promised from this world because as it is filled with beauty, it is equally, if not more, filled with what we know as the deadliest of sins. Be vulnerable to it all but never submissive to the one’s that want more. The goal is to find yourself, never to lose.

I guess what I really want is the world to know that this all means something, that nothing had been without purpose and the purpose was never survival of the fittest. Nothing has the power to change us because nothing can. There are no knights in shining armor galloping through our gates, only angels and demons living within us wondering who it is we’ll choose to feed.