The world is looking green. Today is May 2.
Some days I think I’m wasting my life away. I’m 18 years old, and what have I accomplished? I know that sounds crazy because I’ve only been alive for a fraction of my life, but somehow I’ve convinced myself I’m supposed to have achieved world peace or found the cure to cancer. I’m not sure how long I’ve felt this way, but I guess it’s been for years. I think other people share this same sense of emotional turmoil from time to time. I don’t think it’s a very good way to be.
I think for a lot of people (or at least the people I know), we are all trying to find the meaning of life. I know I am. Even though I haven’t been around for too long, and as much as I hear I’m wise beyond by years, I’ve found myself searching for my purpose. My favorite place to search seems to be quotes. I’m not quite sure why that is, but I’ve found other people can take words and emotions and memories and capture them far more eloquently and more purely than I can.
See, the thing about quotes is they don’t change. I can find and save them, not looking at them for years. When I come back to those neatly preserved words, however, they haven’t changed a bit, even when I have. These last few days I’ve been reading a lot of quotes to find the answer to my old existential questions: What is my purpose? Who will I be when I grow up? What am I supposed to be doing with my time and skills?
So far, I’ve come up short on concrete answers. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised no one has come up with a solid answer to, “What is the meaning of life?” yet, but I’m still a little disappointed. Like other teenagers, I want life to be easy. I want to be taken care of and loved and to have all my dreams come true. But the thing with life is that doesn’t always happen, at least not in the way I imagine it.
Maybe that’s what faith, trust and magic are: the belief that even if the path we walk isn’t easy or isn’t the one we expected, in the end we will still reach the right destination. I’d like to believe that. All my life (or at least since the start of high school) whenever people ask me what I want to do in life, I respond with, “Do good and help people.” Then I’ll laugh and give a more concrete answer about colleges and careers, which seems to appease them. But in all reality, I don’t think I have a set-in-stone plan about how I want to spend my life. I know people who are positive they will become healthcare workers, politicians and lawyers (all of which are admirable professions), but I don’t have a clear answer for where I’ll be in five years, much less 10.
The one part of my complex life plan that I have locked down in my mind is that when I’m old and shriveled and unable to take care of myself anymore, I’ll be able to look back at my life and say yes to two questions: Did I do good? Did I help people? I’m not sure what the meaning of life is. I’m still a teenager, so I think that’s OK. All I know is I don’t want to have lived my life in vain. If I’m on my deathbed looking back on how I’ve spent the last however many years of my life and can’t honestly say yes to those two questions, I think I’ll have missed the purpose of life, whatever that may be. Some days are struggles, others are filled with joy and peace. I hope I can spend every one I have doing good and helping people.
“In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” ― Anne Frank
How did you spend your 46th day of social distancing? Let us know in the comments below.
