Engaging Life: A personal narrative of hope and change

Within everyone, there is a wild, untamed soul. It threatens to burst free of the confines that our bodies place on it. It hammers away in our minds. It infiltrates all that we do, constantly yearning for that moment when those binding chains shatter.

Without it, we would be as a foreign desert. Our lives would be barren and void. We would wander through this world with no purpose, with no goals. We would simply exist.

That untamed soul drives us on and urges us to new frontiers; it is our compass in the great seas of change.

Still, this very same soul is sometimes lost, buried beneath the tumultuous waves that ceaselessly crash against the shores of our lives.

These days, it seems like life has a way of thundering along so quickly that we barely have time to take a breath.  There are bills to pay and obligations to be met.  Projects get put off until tomorrow, but tomorrow never arrives.  We enjoy our lives in fleeting glimpses, as if looking out through the window of a speeding train.

As I sit and ponder the essence of life, I pause to consider the world around me. It’s a rat race; of this, I’m positive. Nevertheless, that raging soul within me says that that’s not the way it’s meant to be.

I’ve been baptized by tears and tempered by fire. I’ve felt the rage of planets colliding within me, and witnessed the dying embers of love slowly fade away.

Like a determined soldier marching through the pouring rain, I endure.

So it is with everyone. We have all felt the pain of a lost love, or the disappointment of failure. We have all grown weary from time to time, but through it all, we endure.

Again, our souls scream out into the fading night, we were meant to do more than just endure; we were meant to live.

And this is the choice we have to make.

"If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." Dale Carnegie

“In all things it is better to hope than to despair” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Hope never abandons you; you abandon it” George Weinberg

It’s been several years since I made that choice.

I remember how slowly the sun sank below the horizon, and how the white-tipped waves reached in to tickle my toes. I remember the soft tang of salt that filled the air, and the gulls that skimmed lightly over the sea. I remember the sandpipers as they danced away from the waves, scurrying about in a frantic waltz across the shore.

Before that moment, my life was forfeit. I had spent all my time working, forcing myself to take one more step in order to earn that extra penny. I was exhausted. It was as if the world had ceased, such was my delirium.

That single moment in time was all it took for me to realize the truth: There is more to life than what is forced upon us.

We do not have to be slaves to what society dictates; in fact, we are free to choose our own path. It is what we do with our lives that matter, it is these moments in time that bring meaning to a weary existence.

It only takes a smile, or a simple touch, to create a lasting moment. It is these small gestures that memories make.

Today is a new day, a new time. It is a time in which we must all take a moment to step back and look at our lives, to take a look at what's important. It is a time to leave all worry behind; worry will not add a single day to our lives.

In the end, all the things we strive for, money, power, security, all of these things don't matter. The only thing that matters is how we live our lives, and the magical moments in time that we make.

Feel free to share your stories of hope in the comments section.