Accepting Life & Potential For Greatness

Today is the first day of the fall season that the weather has actually embraced that it is, in fact, fall. It's cloudy and cold, and the leaves on the trees have turned from bright green to orange and yellow. Good job, weather. Gold star for you.

With my birthday coming up next week, I've been thinking a lot about the past year, as one would normally do when turning a new age. It's been a pretty solid year for me. There have certainly been lots of moments of sadness and confusion and anger, but it's all just a part of life. I've learned to always press on, because even in the valleys of life, you can always look forward to the mountains coming up.

Over the past few years, I've set a lot of goals for myself. Some have been successful, and some have not. In previous years of attempting to achieve those goals and ultimately failing at most of them (because I have minus 100000 self discipline,) I've really learned the weight of my actions, and that as I get older, that weight has a heavier affect on the course of my life.

As a young child, my parents orchestrated most of the big decisions in my life. Where we moved, where we went to school, that's about it. And that's the point: there weren't very many big events in my life as a child. No more kids came after me, we never went on any big family trips, I never made a mistake so big that it altered my life or made me radically change the way I lived. It's all kind of been just, average.

And I suppose that's alright. As a result of my uneventful adolescent life, I have so many aspirations and ideas and dreams for how my future family might operate. Even though sometimes I'm upset with the way my parents raised me, I'm so incredibly thankful that, instead of entering into adulthood with a long list of things I don't want to do, I'm entering into it with a plethora of things that I do want to do.

A childhood void of traveling and not much excitement or new experiences, leaves room for me to experience it all on my own as an adult. Instead of being angry about how I was (or wasn't) raised, I want to choose to move forward with an open mind and a blank slate, ready for all there is for me to do and experience in the world.

I certainly feel lucky. There is so much potential for greatness in this life, and realizing that I have a choice to either make it amazing or make it a mess, is no doubt, a big realization. But with that responsibility comes possibility, and I want to take as much advantage of that possibility as possible.