The fog had rolled in without warning, silent and thick. If it weren’t for the lights that lined the streets and the glow of a front porch here and a bedroom window there, it would have been almost eery. Instead, it was beautiful. I stood there with my face pressed up against the glass while the heat from my breath married the cold of the window and took it all in. I’m not sure what it was -the houses undoubtedly filled with peacefully sleeping people, the snow on the ground and the fog in the air or the silence of the night-but I suddenly felt small, insignificant. In that instant, all of my worries seemed to disappear and so did all of my fears. I had the grounding realization (Not for the first time) that my life was only mine. That there are billions of other people out there each with their own trivialities and sources of pain and joy and heartache and love and that, while we are all connected, we are also all alone. That we are singular people living singular and separate lives that just happen to intertwine occasionally.
Hours earlier I’d curled up in the loveseat occupying the corner of our living room and engaged in conversation with my visiting grandmother. Our conversation ranged from light and thoughtless to heavy and thought-provoking with a higher concentration of the latter. At one point I got to thinking (Again, not for the first time) about just how short life is. How small each of us are. Standing there with my breath fogging up the bathroom window and my fingers numbing from the cold, I looked out at this world of ours and somehow the first thought took the second thought by the hand and they married. They affirmed and completed each other. And the rush of emotions that resulted was both eery and beautiful. It was wonderfully haunting and grounding.
I crawled back into bed even more tired than I had been before. I closed my eyes and willed sleep to come, but it didn’t. I couldn’t manage to shake the feeling I’d had. I started asking myself questions -Who am I? What is my purpose? Will I make a difference? What will happen when I die?- and it didn’t really help. I like asking questions, sure. But I like knowing answers more and it just so happened that the questions I was asking myself had answers I didn’t possess. Only two were even worth attempting to answer: Who am I? And what, exactly, is my purpose?
I have always believed that every moment, every choice, every action, every laugh, tear and heartache we have ever lived, made, taken, had, shed and weathered is what makes us the people that we are. I believe that we are constantly growing and constantly changing and that that is a beautiful thing. That who we are is not something that can be summed up in a few sentences or even a 10 page paper because who we are is 31,536,000 moments a year every year we’ve lived since we took our first breaths. It’s a mix tape of all of the nights we’ve cried ourselves to sleep, danced around in our bedroom in our underwear and sang at the top of our lungs when we thought no one was listening. It’s every break up we’ve weathered, every friendship we’ve fostered and all of the people we have welcomed into and pushed out of our lives. It’s our secret hopes, our paralyzing fears, our wildest dreams…It’s undefinable. And yet, it’s so explicitly defined.
But our purpose? How do we ever know what that is? I search for signs everywhere and see things that aren’t there and still the best that I can come up with at the end of every day is what I hope mine is or could be. Sometimes, on foggy, silent nights, this bothers me and I would love if someone would just spell it out for me, tattoo it on my forehead-something! But on others, on most days, I’m glad I don’t know. That would take the mystery -and therefore a lot of the fun and, of course, the teachable moments- out of life. This one guaranteed life that we get. And that’s when I remember that it’s not the destination -it’s not where we’re headed- it’s where we are and how we’ve gotten there thus far. It’s the journey. Always the journey.
And then I remember that life is short. That we must do what we love and love what we do. That, in the end, the things that other people think and feel won’t matter. That rules and expectations don’t matter. That all that truly matters is the ability to say to yourself, ‘I feel fulfilled. I am happy.’ That there is no measure of success more important than your own. And that the best thing you will ever do is follow your own heart.
Because despite the fact that we are all very small pieces of a very large puzzle, we are also the only pieces in our own puzzles. Our lives intertwine periodically -often, even- but my life is mine and yours is yours. So I’ll do what makes me happy. I’ll love who I want to. Even against my better judgment and without regard to what others say, think or feel. Sometimes without regard to consequences. I will form my own opinions and speak them as I see fit. I will dance in my underwear in my bedroom and sing horribly while I do the dishes at work. I will pretend that I’m from London and use a fake British accent in public, just because. I will drop old and boring and common at the drop of a hat when I need a dose of fun and exciting and new. Even if that means taking a route I hadn’t foreseen or packing up and leaving the country and my life behind for a new experience.
I will do whatever it takes because, in my opinion, people often take life too seriously. They spend so much time trying to be successful that they seem to forget what success is. I’m convinced some even set out for it not knowing what they themselves are looking to find. And that’s not good. Those people are so busy trying to live life that they’re actually missing it.
This moment? It’s all that’s guaranteed. Forget another life. You’re not guaranteed another day, hour or even minute. And that feeling? That’s also grounding and eery and hauntingly beautiful. Find it. Seek it out and then? Hold onto it and live your life accordingly. Because we are certainly small by comparison, but we are also the largest factors in our own lives.
Who are YOU? What do you want out of YOUR life? Are you on the right track to get there? And, most importantly, are you happy?