Living.

“What if, you know, what if we just give in to it, and say this is what (life) is, then it gets good, and its fighting it that makes it so bad.” – Through Painted Deserts (Donald Miller).

Donald Miller’s books never cease to blow my mind. I always feel like they are written just for me, and I seem to always read them at the perfect time.

I’ve been thinking about life a lot lately. Life and happiness, and what it means to be happy in this life. I feel like I am in a constant pursuit of happiness, which I don’t feel is uncommon. Every decision I make is in hopes that I can finally find the life that makes me happy. As it turns out, I am a hard person to please. My lifestyle is really good. I travel to cool places, only work jobs that I am passionate about, and spend a lot more time doing things I love than doing things I don’t love. I have made drastic decisions for no other reason than to cut out things from my life that make me unhappy. Dropping out of school and moving to the mountains isn’t something that was a necessarily safe move, but it was one I felt like I had to do. All of these decisions and movements in my life to pursue happiness have led me to where I am now, and things are, all in all, going pretty well for me. I am pretty happy. I may even be happier than most. Still, however, I live with this constant and unavoidable feeling of wanting something more. I live with this feeling that I am still not doing it right. I am still constantly stressed financially, I still don’t really like having to get up early and go to work, I desire a strong community, and I miss things from back home. I still wonder what I am doing wrong. And it is when I worry about these things that I start trying to create these elaborate plans to fix everything in my life. I am obsessed with 5-year plans. I think less about how great the day that I am currently living is than I do about what I want to be doing 365 days from now. I can’t enjoy my life the way I truly desire to, because I am too focused on improving these small little details. I get told by many people that I am spontaneous, but, in all honesty, I couldn’t live in the moment if my life depended on it. And, really, my life does depend on it.

“I don’t want to think about life anymore, I just want to live it.” (Ibid)

I want to live and to love, and I want nothing more. I don’t want to worry, I don’t want to stress, I don’t want to know what I am doing tomorrow, and I want, more than anything, to be ok with that. I want to be able to wake up, look outside my window, and be truly thankful to be alive, truly thankful and truly happy with the life I am living. It shouldn’t matter if I have $2 or $2000 in my bank account, it shouldn’t matter if I know what I am doing next week Wednesday; all that should matter is that I am alive.

So, with all that being said, in the coming months and years I hope to make decisions that some may not understand, some that may turn out to be huge mistakes, some that put a smile on my face. I don’t know what these will look like, I don’t want to know, but I am hopefully taking strides to destroy these five year plans. Taking strides to live in the moment and enjoy the day, and to not worry about tomorrow. There are too many unhappy people in this world; I don’t want to be another one.