This is life?

Rebirth
This post at GrayDrifter today has really spoken to me. It would be easy to write it off as so much teenage drama. But there is much more is these words. There is raw emotion -- anger, confusion, hope, anguish -- the very essence of human life. And it struck me that I don't allow those things in my life nearly so often as I used to. We call it growing up, maturing. But to me its starting to feel like callousing. Like this life rubs and wears us so that as we get older we grow numb. We lose touch with the pain that is the pulsing of human existence. And I contend that without feeling this pain we never feel joy. You can come up with whatever reasons you want -- you can say some cliche like "You can't taste the sweet without the sour" or whatever you want. But just from experience I don't think that you can ever have the one without the other. It is the tragedy of this life. Maybe it's just me... I don't know. Even the somewhat cliche comment by 'Peeps' -- "So the winds of change have started drifting you." ...! It just strikes a chord in my soul. Maybe I remember too clearly my days getting ready to leave everything and everyone... maybe it's that I can still reach out to those days of change and excitement... maybe I can see them slipping away, so soon to be out of reach, perhaps forever.

I think its just the sense of adventure I see in his words. The going forward into the unknown. The process of being changed and molded and refined and broken into something that you may have never conceived before. I think I miss that feeling. And now it seems silly to me. Immature. I think of High School and remember that we all thought our lives were the great story of the ages. The stuff that epics are born from. But as I look forward now I feel that reality is something very different... very dull even. And so I am inclined to shake my head at such 'delusions of grandeur' and think "they'll learn, they'll grow out of it." But suddenly I don't want to grow out of it. Suddenly I am grasped by the hope that perhaps I was wrong to leave my epic dreams. Perhaps this life still is an adventure.

And here I am, indulging myself in drama. I'm sure that the mature who read this will shake their heads at my naivete, tell themselves that I must still be a child with a lot of growing up to do. And that's probably true. But I wish that this could be the beginning of something more. The beginning of living my life as more than just a routine, of feeling more than a dull satisfaction at what I've accomplished. Of being more alive every day. It's probably just nostalgia, but I can't help feeling that I've been missing something important in my life lately... perhaps I've been living a life of quiet desperation. All that and I'm still so young...