Stories

I’m currently on my reading week from school.  I decided to flee the cold weather of Calgary and visit my father and brother in Victoria.  Alas, the most snow, and the coldest temperatures they’ve had all year made an appearance during my visit.  Luckily, I had the chance to stumble around Victoria yesterday, and I ended up in a fantastic bookstore by the name of Monroe's.  I love book stores.  I love the smell, the feel and the weight of books.  I love discovering new writers.  I love getting lost in the story, literally losing myself with the characters.  Words are incredibly powerful and when someone is a gifted writer I feel as if my own life is pale in comparison, as if my life is the story and they story is now reality.  After these books I feel altered, sometimes taking parts of the character into my own life, melding their speech with my own.

Something needs to be said for biographies.  There’s something so raw and untamed about listening to another’s conquests.  Sharing in ones victories, sorrows and purgatory experiences connects them with me, and reaffirms my own excitement in life.  Here before me sits a person who’s lived to tell the tale.  Although the details may be slightly embellished, this is a true story.  I guarantee you that if you sit down with anyone and ask about their life you’ll discover something interesting.  Accomplishments you wish you’d thought of, let alone completed.  Pain that makes you thankful that you’ve been spared such wrath.  Tales of the human plight are so invigorating to me because I’m comforted in the fact that I’m not alone in my struggles.  Loneliness is an emotion everyone has experienced at one time or another, and this emotion tends to isolate me from the world.  These stories bring me back to reality.

My favorite part of any story is the reckless choices, whether they worked out or not.  I like to believe I live my life according to my rules but when I honestly exam my motives, I’ve stopped myself due to the fear of judgement.  Whether that judgement came from my peers or my family, it still made an impact.  So why can’t I let go and just jump?  I imagine it’s connected to the concern for my friends and family.  Growing up I’ve been lectured on my tendency to be driven to the point of obsessiveness.  My family told me that to live a truly full life you need to have many interests that you pursue at the same time, juggling them to make them fit together, whereas I take all my eggs and put them in one basket.  As an example my dad would talk about professional athletes and how hard many people work towards becoming one, when statistically they will never achieve their goal.  I’m twenty-one now and I know an Olympic athlete.  When I was younger we swam together in the same swim club.  She was definitely obsessively driven towards her goal of becoming an Olympic swimmer for Canada and she accomplished this goal by swimming in the 2008 Beijing Summer Games.  

Fear, it consumes our daily lives.  Fear of what others think, fear of repeating mistakes, of never learning.  Fear of the unknown.  It’s strange the power fear has on our lives and the compromises we give it to make it complacent.  Not everyone is happy experiencing a small amount of satisfaction from partaking in many things at once.  If that’s true then maybe I’m meant to sink fully into my own nature and pursue my dreams obsessively in the hopes to master my craft.  A couple years ago I asked my close friends to describe me in one word; they all said intense.  Every one of them told me at different times that when choosing out of the entire English language, the word that described me was intense.  Intense is an extreme adjective, a word fitting of an extreme personality.  I don’t know how I feel about being intense, I certainly like to believe I’m an easygoing person, but even I have to admit I never let myself get walked on.  I speak my mind, which is a possibly a positive, most definitely a negative at times.  If I intend to grow as a person, than I feel like it’s time to start recognizing these facts.

Life so far has been nothing but a constant learning experience.  I expect it will only continue to be a learning experience, and when it stops being a learning experience I’ll be dead.  So until then I’ll have to make some interesting choices.  I don’t know if I truly have the ability or the talent to achieve my dreams.  Perhaps my fear will consume me and I’ll settle for typical life.  Who knows, all I can hope for is an interesting story.