When you do what you love, the seemingly impossible becomes simply challenging, the laborious becomes purposeful resistance, the difficult loses its edge and is trampled by your progress. -Steve Maraboli (Life, the Truth, and Being Free)

On my way to work last Tuesday, I decided that I walk strangely. Of course, I can't tell for SURE because I can't see myself unless I watch my reflection in building windows. I try to refrain from doing this because I'm concerned that the people around me will think that I am checking myself out rather than worriedly attempting to diagnosis my mobility issues. But the flip side of that is that they already think I'm strange because I walk oddly.

My legs just feel like they don't want to cooperate in a smooth fashion when I move around. They seem to prefer a jerkier, slightly lopsided motion, potentially exacerbated by the fact that I walk about 3x faster than the normal person, as it is. This is something that I cannot help. When I try to slow down, I am faced with a sensation that feels like what trying to stop a very heavy wagon from rolling down a very steep hill feels like. I have to concentrate really really hard on moving my feet more slowly. Usually, I just give up and speed back up again. Because, actually, my walk gets even more awkward when I attempt to reign it in.

The other day when I was walking home from work, an older businessman with a briefcase in hand actually commented on it.

"Must be those Chuck Taylors making you walk so fast," is what I heard as I zoomed by him.

"Haha, could be! Or just the cold!" And, with a good-natured smile, I kept going. But seriously. I must look...irregular. I blame my New Yorker mother. As a small child, I had to move my little stubby legs at double-time to keep up with her purposeful stride, and, as I became accustomed to moving at that speed, proportionally, I continued to move that quickly when I got older. That is my thinking.

Things are far worse now that there is an irritating amount of snow on the ground. Now I wobble on top of moving strangely. On Friday I almost careened into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Such is my life.

Today, as I sat in John's car at the Bryn Mawr train station, I was struck by the thought that I really ought to make a concentrated effort at self-improvement. When I said this thought aloud, I was met with a look that made me think he was thinking that I was a lunatic. Which was nice, for all intents and purposes (assuming he wasn't thinking that I was so hopeless that working towards self-betterment was a fruitless endeavor), but which didn't change my mind.

I too easily give myself a lot of leeway when it comes to figuring my shit out. "I'm young." "There's time." "I've got a lot to get through first." Yeah, sure. Excuses. It's not like I am suddenly going to hit a place in my life where things are suddenly smooth sailing and I can kick back and hone whatever skills I think that I might have. If I keep giving into those excuses, letting them ultimately direct me, I'm going to wind-up as a very boring and very unaccomplished person. Just like most everything in life, self-direction and self-knowledge take effort and work. But I'm fairly certain that it is well worth it. In the end, I'll know exactly where I stand. I don't think I'd ever quite realized how exhausting leading an interesting and full life really is. As far as I can tell, society does a bang-up job of wearing us all down to little nubs of the people we are by telling us what we "should" be doing. To live to the fullest takes a kind of courage and a kind of independence that I hadn't really considered. Life is too short to stay safe and to put off exploration and development. I have to work to get where and what I want. And now is the time to nail down exactly what it is that I DO want. Period.