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I was having a hard time with extra schoolwork this week, and I'm going to have to sacrifice my weekend for getting my work done seconds before the deadline. After being home-schooled since forth grade, this is my first year in public school as a sophomore. I'm really overwhelmed by due dates and homework. As I tried to get through reading work, I listened to Taylor Swift's "Long Live". I heard the line:
I said remember this feeling
I passed the pictures around
Of all the years that we stood there
On the sidelines wishing for right now
I realized that I had worked for years to get to this point, this long, frustrating, stressful point. I remember as a kid, I wished I could be bigger, wished that I could be in high school, almost to college. I'm there. I'm in high school learning about cells and taking Driver's Ed. It's what I've always dreamed. It's something that most people dream of as a kid, getting bigger, getting older, and being looked at as an adult. It's not all it's cracked up to be, and many people say that and look back to when they where kids, and say that they didn't appreciate what they had then. Childhood isn't the last good thing in the world, far from that. Childhood, is the start of potential, and just because your life is more complicated than clovers and cartwheels doesn't mean that it is over.
Don't give up now; you aren't even a quarter of the way into life. There's so much more to see, so much to accomplish, so many people to meet. Even though I'm going to school now it doesn't mean that I have to sit in the classrooms all day staring at the clock above the whiteboard and wishing that I could go home. Even if situations change, schools change, friends change, or views change, doesn't mean that your attitude has to. Good things have come out of the change, I've been able to talk and interact with people more by going to school, and I've been able to study French, a course I would have never been able to take at home.
I was at a lake that I live by this evening. I lied down on the bench overlooking the glassy waters, stared up into the plum sky, watched the clouds drift, felt the wind ruffle my hair, and listened to the crickets. There are roughly 200-400 billion stars in this galaxy. White and red dwarfs, supernovas, red giants, and yellow dwarfs like our sun. Yellow dwarfs are the most common stars in this galaxy. We could have ended up on a planet circling a red dwarf with 89-day years and orange skies, but we ended up here on an unremarkable arm on the Milky Way galaxy. It's improbable, even a miracle, but we take it for granted, because it's always been there. We sit and think to ourselves, 'Life could be better,' 'I could have _____ right now,' 'and I should be doing something better right now with my life.' It's a fact that most of us are going to grow up, go to college, get some menial job, be married, divorced, and die.
What little time we have, we waste it wishing that we had something better, or that life could mean something more, when we never look up from where we are to see what we have. Look up from this page right now. What do you see? Find three things, just three that you like about where you are. You could start with something simple, like you're not on the bottom of the ocean and your organs aren't compacting into your helmet, or that you're not being thrown out of an airlock. It doesn't have to be something reasonable, it just has to be something there. Be grateful that it is there and that you're not somewhere else. If you don't like where you are right now, or you are unhappy with yourself, try to resolve it. If you are going to live out a normal life, laugh while doing it. Just really be there, and not in some far off place having a better time. Live while you're alive. Look forward, because this is the time for everything, and this is the beginning of something, every second of the day, everything counts. Look up to the stars, and just see.
We are the Kings and the Queens
You traded your baseball cap for a crown
When they gave us our trophies
And we held them up for our town
And the cynics were outraged
Screaming this is absurd
Cause for a moment a band of thieves
In ripped up jeans got to rule the world
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