Life is now

In honor of my beloved friend Kristin, and his ever wise, kind words:

“In life, there are people who act and people who react. You and I, we act, and maybe, we’ll never be able to understand people who, instead, just react. If life doesn’t give us what we want, we change home, we change state, we change country, friends, jobs, lovers, surroundings. We change. People who react are incapable of seeing life that way. They wait, and wait, and wait for something to react to. It’s not that they are not brave enough, or don’t have enough self confidence; they just don’t take action because they don’t want to feel responsible for what could go wrong.

You and I, we want to be the foundation of our destiny, the reason why we’re victorious or we fail. They just settle for waiting and seeing. Tomorrow may be brighter because somebody else may take action for them and fix their ordeal”.

This morning I woke up to the light sounds of an earthquake; my nightstand shook for a moment, and I heard the familiar trembling of furniture just barely moving. I woke up as I was dreaming of having a conversation with a person very dear to me. I woke up to the words I was telling him, right before the quake brought me to the full awareness of waken life, “ Don’t take life for granted; don’t take people for granted. This is all a privilege and tomorrow may be too late”; then I opened my eyes and realized it was just a dream.

I guess I’ve been thinking about this topic incessantly lately. Tomorrow and its meaning, living in circumstances that don’t fulfill us anymore. Personally tomorrow was never my friend. Tomorrow for me was the gap between happiness and being stuck in a marriage I no longer felt I belonged to. Tomorrow was the difference between my freedom, and being prisoner of a relationship where I was *never*loved, for five long years. Waiting for tomorrow, I somehow missed that the man I was with never loved me for me, but loved himself through me and, in that case also, tomorrow was my partner in crime in my inability to see the truth. Waiting for tomorrow almost made me marry a man who would have been the most striking misfit to my personality that I ever knew. Till I realized tomorrow wasn’t coming and I needed to live for today once again. I regret now that it took me so long to realize what was in front of me all along, from day one. I believed in tomorrow, I believed that tomorrow could make the miracle, make a difference in my life, until I realized that the only person who is going to make a difference in my existence is the one writing these words on this cloudy February morning.

This blog wants to be a hymn to today, to the law of “carpe diem”. Ironically, as I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while now, an older gentleman  walking down the street with his wife stopped me and my friend  not too long ago to tell us to take lots of pictures of ourselves and of our present days because we would not stay young and beautiful forever…How did he know? Did he see it in my eyes? Did he feel it the same way I feel it? And as we grow older, do we feel the burden of time and regrets build upon us even more powerfully?
I want to use a line I’ve heard recently to conclude this blog today, and wish to all of you who are reading my words that you may realize that life is now:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover (Mark Twain).”