Friday, August 05, 2005

Blessed is this life and I'm gonna celebrate being alive

So... I leave in a week. Actually. One week. At this time, seven days from now, I'll be on a plane from D.C. to Ethiopia. Suddenly it's real. Suddenly I'm truly sad and scared and nervous, which I know I shouldn't be since this will be a wonderful experience, but it's still hard.

And when one is whittling away their time, actually expecting and waiting for something huge to happen, life doesn't seem to stand still; instead it rushes by in one trivial, more or less inconsequential blur. Let's see if I can verbalize.

This next week should be really important to me because it's my last time at home for almost a year, excepting the 2+ weeks I'm home over winter break. I want it to be special, brimming with crazy nights with friends and overall, just unforgettable experiences. In a sense, it's as if this is my last week alive and I want to inundate myself with my world. But in the end it's never like that, and it doesn't really matter. Suddenly I find myself doing little things that have needed to be done since forever (as if they really matter now), but I'm not spending every last drop of my energy out with friends. Example: my mosquito netting canopy fell from my ceiling last Thanksgiving. We just put it back up. But does it really make that much of a difference what I'm doing now, right before I leave? Sure I want to spend time with all of my loved ones before I go. But if I haven't been living how I truly want to, and if I haven't been making as many memories as possible, then it's not like I can make up for that in the week before I leave.

So I don't know, maybe this is cheesy, but you know the saying "live every day like it's your last"? Sure it makes sense, but why ever consider that your last day should be your best? Personally I would want to spend my last day peacefully and surrounded by family. But I have every other day of my life to value simply because it is another day. And obviously there's a WORLD of opportunities out there.