In my quest to live the fullest life I can, I often find myself going too fast. I went through my teens years yearning to be older.. I went through my college years wanting to enter the “real world”… I spent my first “real world” years yearning to get going with my “real life”…and the vicious cycle continues.
I eat too fast. I over-schedule myself. I can’t really sit through a 3-hour movie without checking my watch (unless it’s Inception). I brush my teeth while cleaning up my house. I just can’t seem to sit still, embrace the silence and just BE still.
Even now as I’m writing, I’m checking emails, listening to music and watching TV. When was the last time you just sat and watched TV without constantly checking your blackberry, being on your laptop, and fast forwarding through commercials?
And now as I near my thirties, I find that this “hurry up and grow up” syndrome is rearing its ugly head again. Where did I think I’d be by thirty? The honest truth is, I’ve never even thought about it.
When I was 15, I thought “when I grow up”, I’d be a rich and famous producer/actor/writer in Hollywood, but how many 15 year-olds think that? I never dreamed of the white dress, the white picket fence, or even the white knight. I never thought about having kids, a great career, or even having a dog. I just knew that when I grew up, everything would be great, everything would be like the Dawson Creek-esque optimistic view of life I’d imagined, because everything and everyone would be where they were supposed to be.
So it comes to no surprise to anyone that when friends of mine start having babies, start getting married, start referring to their lives as “our” and “we”, your single self starts contemplating the societal norm of turning 30. Shouldn’t I have 2.5 kids now with a husband, a white picket fence, and a dog? Shouldn’t I be making tons of money and have a lake house in Lake Geneva? Isn’t this what society deems of me? Shouldn’t hitting 30 make me ponder the quickest way to the alter, mortgage broker and ob/gyn? Shouldn’t having these things make me “grown up”?
Obviously, the answer to that is, “No”. My Peter Pan syndrome doesn’t mean that I don’t want to have kids, that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with (preferably) one person, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t want it all. It just means that I (think) I have finally figured out that I don’t work on everyone else timetable. That I am trying to embrace my own timeline and be present in this moment and try not to rush in to my “grown up” existence. Because, really, do any of us really ever feel “grown up”?
Which brings me back to going too fast. If the last few months have taught me anything, it is that planning for the future is overrated. That sometimes, you just have to be still to appreciate the stillness of the world. That life will eventually work itself out (because it always does), and being unattached and unmarried and childless at 30 does not mean that you will be that way forever. Or maybe it does. But what matters is this moment, right now.
“We are always getting ready to live but never living.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.” ~Aerosmith
