Premature Closure

If you are not care­ful, you will define your­self too soon. Your val­ues and goals will stick some­where in late ado­les­cence or early adult­hood. You will out­grow your goals but be afraid to make new ones. Your fear of going on will keep you stuck in some emo­tional decade of the past. The world changes by the minute (or by the mil­lisec­ond). Noth­ing is more futile or frus­trat­ing that try­ing to ham­mer the world back into an old mold. Time goes for­ward whether we want it to or not.

Dur­ing the last few days, I vis­ited a place where I lived for over a decade. I drove by houses and apart­ments that had been home. The thought that struck me was one of being shocked by how eas­ily I set­tled for the com­fort­able and the pre­dictable. The Mys­te­ri­ous Life Force has done a great job of push­ing me for­ward. Places I con­sid­ered ideal are really just com­mon place now. I put a lot of time and money into some of those houses, but they now reg­is­ter as bland and almost for­got­ten foot­notes in my life.

Peo­ple have an urge to merge. We fear not just the unknown but who we might be if we let life take us on its full adven­ture. There is a part of me that wanted to stay in some lit­tle place near the col­lege where I grad­u­ated three decades or so ago. Another part of me wanted to live and die within the shadow of my high school. At times like this, I remem­ber the old adage that “a rut is just a grave with both ends knocked out.”

Pre­ma­ture clo­sure cuts short the qual­ity lessons of life — or trans­forms them into more painful forms. You either take the jour­ney, or the jour­ney takes you.