kissing strangers

My 26th birthday has come and gone, life is good and I’m still on the road, well kind of on the road. I have some cashflow issues due to earlier this year when it was pretty much impossible to find a job no matter how hard we tried or where we drove to and my general feeling at the time that things would work out and why don’t I just charge it all on my credit card, and hey I know I’m broke but lets still road trip into the outback and drink all the time. Yeah those where good times, but it’s all catching up to me now.

After my experience in New Zealand when I was 18 out in the world for the first time and racking up thousands of dollars in debt through my wonderful parents who were kind enough to back my up in my time of major irresponsibility I had decided that I would be much more responsibile this trip when it came to money. That didn’t happen. Luckily I have Candice & Eden who let me stay at their house rent free while I get my shit sorted.

It’s funny looking at my life, I didn’t image that at 26 I’d be broke and crashing with a friend in Australia without a proper job. I’d always kind of pictured more for myself at this age, I guess I figured by 26 I’d have done all my travelling and adventure seeking and be settling down with a real job and a real house and maybe even a boyfriend.

Candice & Eden were trying to freak me out about being 26 on my birthday because they didn’t like it, Eden likes to insist that he’s still 25. After thinking about it I realize that I really don’t mind getting older, I like where I am right now (aside from the money issues) and I know where I want to go and I’m excited about it. Sometimes the thought of getting older is scary especially when friends start getting married and having babies and buying houses and you think about all the things that society expects you to have and to do by certain ages and sometimes it freaks me out and worries me and I wonder, will I ever get there?

My travelling life has been amazing, I’ve seen and done so many cool things, and met loads of awesome people but for all the good things it’s still hard a lot of the time. Like when you have to say goodbye to the awesome people, especially if it’s someone you’ve been hanging out with for a while or someone who you felt really close to. You have to make a lot of sacrifices for this life, the people at home who envy you don’t always realize that.

It’s kind of weird being back in Melbourne a year later. Working in the same office, living at the same place, taking the same buses at the same time. It’s kind of nice though.

I don’t know if I’m ready for it, but I do feel like I’m done with twenty three. Twenty Four though just seems too old for me. Twenty four is almost twenty five – a quarter of a century. Everybody I know is shacking up, getting a ‘real job,’ bringing on responsibility in one form or another.

I still feel like a kid.

A kid who’s just running around trying to have fun while everyone else is trying to grow up.

I feel like I mostly understand life, I get it, it’s life – whatever. I’m not satisfied though, not lately, and I don’t know what I want or where I’m going or what I’m doing. I’m not saying that I think I should know this by now, but it can be frustrating not to have a plan. Most people have some kind of plan by twenty four, I have the beginnings of a mutual fund and a friend’s wedding in Australia next november – and a strong desire to surf. That’s all I’ve got.

I don’t really have skills and I feel like I missed out on doing a lot of things in the past. I feel like there’s more that I should be doing, that I’m ready for more but I don’t know what More is. Where it is. I want to be too many things, things that are conflicting, I want to be things that are opposite of each other.

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Twenty Three rocked – but Twenty Four? It’s gonna be epic. Somehow.

Today I was reading 24 hours and I came across an article about fear:

We are all afraid of something, which leads to the pointed question: What would we do if we weren’t afraid? Write a novel, quit a job, get married, divorced, or, like Thoreau, go off into the woods for two years and simplify, simplify, simplify?

Fear shapes who we are. We’re afraid to meet the world naked, so we build personalities to protect ourselves and become imprisoned in a character we build too quickly. We feel comfortable with the status quo – positive or negative – that we have adapted to, like a tailor-made straightjacket. We fear change in a universe where the only constant is change.

One American astronaut stood on the moon looking at this pale, blue dot shining in the black ocean of infinity and realized that the only problems existed on Earth. We have to realize, as the astronaut did, that we create those problems. His was such a life-changing realization he never forgot. We, on the other hand, need to be reminded constantly that we create our own reality. When the alarm goes off at six, we hit the floor running and there isn’t much time for thinking and reflction. We’re too busy and by the time we clean up the kitchen at night and make lunches for the next day, we’re too tired to do anything except read the paper and veg in front of the TV. It’s tiring thinking about it, but we have to find the mental and physical strength to get off that hampster wheel.

One way is to love our fate, which carries the lessons we need with it. If we could get past the fear we would realize we are in partnership with life. We hang onto our life situations instead of allowing life to be; we fear losing as much as change. Our image is tied to our jobs, our sports, our families and we resist anything we haven’t scripted. If we were smarter, we would appreciate our losses because they, not our victories, teach us the important lessons.

“When looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. Nothing happens to you that is not positive even though it looks and feels like a negative. The dark night of the soul comes just before the revelation,” Mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote.

Even when we finally dredge up the courage to deal with our fear, there is no guarantee the next incident will be any less daunting. But it’s pretty much a guarantee we won’t accomplish what we want by ignoring the fear. Some actors throw up before every performance – but they go on stage.

Attending Toastmasters is a great idea, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have butterflies when we step up to the podium. We can, however, teach the butterflies to fly in formation.

“Fear is the mind killer,” wrote Frank Herbert, the author of Dune and many other novels. “Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I must face my fear. I must permit it to pass over me and through me.”