It's the moment that you're living in and not the one that follows
My mother sent me a card for my birthday containing a check and a bookmark. The bookmark is metal and oval and elongated, purple with a silver trim, and a pink tassle is attached to the end, held on by a coil of silver. It's not a very manly bookmark.
It is engraved with this: "It is never too late to be what you might have been." -George Eliot.
I suppose that particular author may have influenced the color scheme of the bookmark. Despite my misgivings about the bookmark's physical properties, I do like the quote. I am not sure if my mom picked it out because she thinks it especially applies to me or just because she found the thing aesthetically appealing.
It is an interesting thought, though. How are you to know what you might have been? Is that decided now or later? Can anyone really know what they might have been?
My shower this morning was filled with my typical self-abusing musings. All about how I am never satisfied and rarely happy; how I covet what others have and am never truly satisfied with what is mine. The old urges come back, the old feelings, the same neurological pathways that by now are scoured like dry riverbeds in my brain. The wants and the desires, the jealousies and the loneliness all competing for my attention and distracting me from what is truly important.
I think of what I might have been: an engineering major, a psychology major, a published author, a perpetual student, a lover, a fighter, a martyr, an optimist. Truly the garden of forking paths, no? Could I have been anyone other than me...
Or just a different me. The problem with that is this: I like me, for the most part. There's not much I want to change.
So whence the bitching? Because it's been a long time since someone's told me, "I know you." Because it's been a long time since I've felt that I know myself.
Sometimes I want to molt. The Boss said, "It's a sad man, my friend, who's livin' in his own skin / And can't stand the company."
Maybe one day I might stand it.
It is engraved with this: "It is never too late to be what you might have been." -George Eliot.
I suppose that particular author may have influenced the color scheme of the bookmark. Despite my misgivings about the bookmark's physical properties, I do like the quote. I am not sure if my mom picked it out because she thinks it especially applies to me or just because she found the thing aesthetically appealing.
It is an interesting thought, though. How are you to know what you might have been? Is that decided now or later? Can anyone really know what they might have been?
My shower this morning was filled with my typical self-abusing musings. All about how I am never satisfied and rarely happy; how I covet what others have and am never truly satisfied with what is mine. The old urges come back, the old feelings, the same neurological pathways that by now are scoured like dry riverbeds in my brain. The wants and the desires, the jealousies and the loneliness all competing for my attention and distracting me from what is truly important.
I think of what I might have been: an engineering major, a psychology major, a published author, a perpetual student, a lover, a fighter, a martyr, an optimist. Truly the garden of forking paths, no? Could I have been anyone other than me...
Or just a different me. The problem with that is this: I like me, for the most part. There's not much I want to change.
So whence the bitching? Because it's been a long time since someone's told me, "I know you." Because it's been a long time since I've felt that I know myself.
Sometimes I want to molt. The Boss said, "It's a sad man, my friend, who's livin' in his own skin / And can't stand the company."
Maybe one day I might stand it.