My friend sent me the following quote a few years ago buried in an otherwise cheerful email on the various updates taking place in her life:
“I still walk through life unseen, unheard, and having no proverbial impact on anything. I wish for things that are more fairy tale than real. I wake up, I go to work, I come home. The end. I’d say sad, huh, but I know you can relate. I wish there were more but I realize that even with what I’ve ‘accomplished’ I still feel like I have nothing…”
She was right, I could relate, which is funny because I remember when I was younger I couldn’t wait to grow up.
I recall one incident in particular when I took to shaving my peach fuzz in High School. I wanted it to grow in thicker. I was too impatient to let this happen naturally. Instead, I wanted to look older and more mature at that exact moment. My father caught me one day and advised me to stop – that I should in fact enjoy not shaving – because there will come a day when I have to shave everyday and I will more than likely hate it. Naturally, I gave him the blankest stare my 15 year old face would allow and continued shaving.
Nowadays I literally have to force myself to shave. I don’t hate shaving, but the fact that I HAVE to shave is ridiculously irritating. Alas, age has taught me that dragging a sharp serrated razor across your face five times a week (at minimum) is not as joyous an undertaking as I would have believed in my teens.
That anecdote pretty much sums up exactly how my life has gone. When I was young, being impatient with the pace of life and longing to be older. And now that I’m older, I don’t necessarily long to be younger, but I find myself sometimes missing the simplicity of the youth I often took for granted.
For example, when I was in Middle School, I couldn’t wait to get to High School. I knew it would be the sheet – it was iiiight. Then I couldn’t wait to get to college, I just knew it would be awesome – ok, college was pretty awesome, but I didn’t realize how awesome it was until I got into the “real world.” Which, of course, in college I also couldn’t wait to get to – until I got to it. Turns out, compared to college, the real world sucks!
It’s not that I haven’t accomplished a lot, I have. But instead of living a life of fantasy and lavish, much like my friend, I wake up, I go to work, I come home – and if I’m not lazy, I hit the gym. Repeat. The end.
But what else did I expect? Maybe it’s a generational thing. Perhaps I failed to consider that this is real life. There are no iPod fast-forward buttons or Internet links I can click that’ll instantaneously transport me to the exact place and successes in life I want. I have to work for those and though they may come quick at times, for the most part, they will come to me at the same anemic pace success has always come for those who work hard for it. Because in most cases, the only place success and reward come before work is in the dictionary.
It’s not that I’m unhappy; I’m more or less confused. I shouldn’t be though since my father worked at the same company for 25+ years. I admire him for this, because sometimes I wonder if I’m going to make it another 25 minutes. I don’t know how he did it – but I don’t know why I think I’m so special that I don’t have to live and cope with the same life everyone else seems content going through.
Still, it does seem a little crazy to think that I spent the majority of my youth longing for this: Adulthood and now that I’m here all I do is work, work, and work some more, so I can hopefully pay all of my bills each month – and if I’m really lucky, take a few days of vacation each year. This is life, huh? I wish I had known this beforehand. I would have done a lot more to embrace the innocence and ease of days past, but I guess hindsight is 20/20.
Perhaps in the end, as MGMT points out in their Time to Pretend song, when it comes to being forever young and growing up maybe there really are only two choices:
This is our decision to live fast and die young.
We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun.
Yeah it’s overwhelming, but what else can we do?
Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?
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