Live it or skip it?

live it or skip it? At risk of sounding self-conscious, self-absorbed, or insecure, I'm going to talk about myself, and I'm going to admit that particularly over the past 10 years I have been a student of life. I suppose we all are to some degree, but I have been a student of myself, not in a student-to-teacher sort of way, but more as a scientist-to-nature. You know, how they go out and live in harsh conditions to observe the ape in his natural habitat. Yah, that's me, both of them, the one seeking to learn and make the world a better place, and the clueless one that just wants to scratch himself in peace and survive life in the wild jungle. What has come to my attention lately is how we go through specific stages in life. We can try to avoid them all we want, but culture and maturity force us into predictable, definable stereotypes. As a teen I just wanted to be an adult (Okay, that was more than ten years ago, but stay with me here.). I wanted respect and independence. Many teens claim their independence by... well, looking and acting like teens with teen clothes, teen music, teen jargon, etc. I, on the other hand, thought that in order to get the respect and independence of an adult, I must look and act like an adult. This makes sense in theory, but the problem was that I lacked the maturity and life experience. So basically, I was an awkward dork. I wonder now how life would have been different, relationships deeper, self-confidence stronger, had I embraced the various phases of life instead of trying to skip them. Well, life is what it is. There's no changing the past, so what can we learn from it? I wonder how often I'm still trying to reach future goals to the point of missing the experiences of the nows. 2:13 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos