Okay, you know when you're watching a movie, and your friend says something to you? You have like a 30 second conversation, and then suddenly you've missed like, HALF the plot. Or you know when you're reading a book and you let your mind wander for a couple seconds? You find yourself lost in the middle of a page on which nothing looks familiar. You just almost glazed your way through a full chapter. You know what I'm talking about, right? That's the feeling I feel right now. I'm less than an hour from my twenty-first birthday, and I feel like I missed some major plot-points. Or maybe I zoned out and glazed over for a few chapters without realizing it. Either way, regardless of the fact that I can't keep my metaphors straight, regardless of the fact that you might not even know what I'm talking about, regardless of the fact that I turn twenty-one in fifty-three minutes, I feel like I missed something.
Like a father who's in the shower when his son takes those first few precious steps, I missed out. When I turned sixteen, I thought, "Look at that. I'm just a hop, a skip, and a jump away from being seventeen. And right after seventeen comes eighteen. Nineteen and twenty will blend together into nothing, and before I know it, I'll be twenty-one." Who was I kidding? I had 5 whole years before I could walk into a bar and drink myself into a coma.
The funniest part is, I was right. My juvenile naïvety turn out to be some sort of redundant, archaic wisdom. Somehow, I let my mind wander, and I glazed over five years. And so much happened in those five years! Everything happened. Everything that shaped the Ryan Roschke today happened between then and now. So why do I feel like I only turned sixteen yesterday? Why do I feel like I'll just turn thirty next week?
I'm sorry I'm being vague and not really elaborating on anything. It just feels like too much to type into one little white electronic space on website with hundreds of thousands of other little white electronic spaces on a laptop in my room. I guess what hit me is this: I spent so much time looking forward to my twenty-first birthday, and now it's finally here. And what now? Big deal. Should I find something else to look forward to? The thing is, we spend so much time looking forward that we miss everything that happens. We spend so much time looking forward that a 30 second conversation results in missing half of what's going on. And when we stop running out of things to look forward to, all that we have left to look forward to is death. And at that point, we've missed the point of living.
But how can I even begin to train myself not to look forward? Focus. Presence. Even then it's still too hard. In the words of my mama, it's always just about living one day at a time. Today this is happening. And what else matters? I guess we look forward because we are often disappointed by today. If you can't live in your own now, you have to look forward to a better future. At my worst point, all I could think about was how badly I wanted to feel better. How badly I wanted to be anywhere else but in the now. In the end, my mama always told me to live one day at a time. That's all you need to do. And eventually, baby steps lead up to an entire journey. It was only in my last few moments before I fell asleep that she'd say, "Tomorrow will be a better day." And I found that tomorrow when I got my transplant.
So here I am. Twenty-one years old. Two decades and some change. And what else matters?
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