Life is really terrifying. Well, time is. Life itself isn't actually all that scary, and if time didn't exist, it might be a lot like wading in the kiddie pool, lukewarm water lapping below your knees. But time. Time is the monster in the closet. Time makes for urgency, and urgency, if disregarded or handled poorly, makes for regrets. And life is often full of regrets; and regrets' close companion, what-if.

Holding patterns feel safe and are easy to slip into. They are also treacherous. The perfect intro to forever. The wrong kind of forever, though. The kind of forever that's more purgatory than heaven, more assembly line than innovation, and more suburbia than outback adventure. It's the kind of forever that I don't want. I haven't quite figured out how to get the forever that I DO want.

I spend a lot of time casting about like an idiot. Sometimes I feel a little like I'm doing the equivalent of walking into walls, even though I know they're there, just to sort of...see what happens. And a bruised nose isn't enough of a deterrent to keep me from continuing to do it. Or maybe I'm like a bat with a defective sonar. Either way, I get frustrated a lot these days, wanting to go in so many different directions that I wind-up stuck in stasis, a frozen lump. I should probably make a list of the various directions in which I wish to go. But when I try, I get overwhelmed and thus, stuck again.

I have used-up a lot of life being stuck. I still had training wheels on my bike long after everyone else was whizzing by on their two-wheelers. I made myself feel better by pretending that my bike was a horse (remember? I wrote this in my last post). Metaphorically speaking...I'm still having to go through the different stages of my life with training wheels. That's frustrating as well.

I don't know what I want.

That is the crux of the issue. To evolve, extend, and move forward, one has to know what one wants. I envy people who are already there. Who already have the vision, the drive, the lifeblood of a wish, to propel themselves through their lives. I get worried that I was born without proper passion, with a lack of motivation, and a predisposition for laziness. Except I know that that's not true, because when I get fired-up about something, I will tear apart the world to get the end that I want. So it's in there.

Time to figure out what I want, and to lose the wheels.