Life Experience

There are two fundamental types of feeling, regardless of what psychology will tell you. There are those that make you feel warm inside, like you want to get up and shout something to the world (and if you're Tom Cruise, you just might). And, there are those that make you feel empty, like a lead weight has pulled you down through your feet. They come in different degrees, and sometimes it is almost impossible to differentiate between them.

I can't speak for others, but seeing as though we are all fundamentally the same, the experience will be similar for everyone.

Ever have a day where everything seems to be on the up and up? Where time and space mold to your command. The very fabric of the universe seems to be bending in your favor.

Fate. Some use that word to describe illogical occurrences. On your way to the mall, you have a blow-out and skid into a telephone pole. When you come to you see the face of a person you haven't seen since high school looking down at you from above the ambulance stretcher. You are stabilized, heal right up, and reconnect with someone you never thought or dreamt of seeing again. You get married, have kids, and live happily ever after. Fate.

I don't see things as fate in the ususal sense. I believe that the path you follow in life is not cut for you. I believe that one is like a ball rolling down an inclined chute. So long as you keep to the straight and narrow, you coast along at a fairly rapid pace. Then again, if you choose to veer off course and climb the embankment, you're going to slow down a bit. If you slow down enough and go off course enough, then maybe just maybe the chute will move a little in that direction and your path will change.

Using my own life experience I can illustrate. My high school used "block scheduling." Basically the same thing that all colleges use, I had four classes up until the new year, and four new ones after that till the end of the year. I went into it rather blase about the whole school thing, as I suppose most people are most years. I rocked the boat; I veered off course. In doing so I met up with people I would not have even thought to have otherwise. I had the time of my life, it was quite possibly the most fun I'd ever had in my entire life. Actually, I'm positive it was. I was able to get an entirely new look at myself, at my life, at life in general.

And then the term ended. I didn't have classes with these people, I had never met them outside of school. They weren't, after all, my "group". I don't know why I cared. I really didn't like my "group" anyways. If ever I hated something I did, perhaps that is a contender. There were two thousand students in my school, yet there wasn't a week I didn't still see them, even then. In the hall, at lunch, something like that. And I was contented to feed off that and went no further.

Graduation. And then I was gone. But even then, in a city of 55,000 I still found my way to them, in passing of course. It didn't help that many of them were a year younger than me, and therefore were still in school for another month. Or that others still moved on to college, across the state, across the country. Even after all that time, we kept up appearances, we kept bumping into one another.

Is this fate? In the general sense, I don't think so. It's my choice, and theirs too. But I think that though the straight and narrow seems usually to be the "easy way" for you needn't slow down or fight momentum, maybe the course was already corrected. Which ever the case, fate or not, I know that certain paths in life make me and others try to break me. I don't know which one this is supposed to be, but I've enjoyed it immensely. Even with the millions of people in this nation, and the hundreds or thousands of miles between us, I still have faith, and sometimes even look out over my shoulder, just in case they happen to be following behind.

[In a way, this time personified my pen name. It is my goal in life, one of them anyways, to be free of road blocks and manmade traps, to soar above this life in a rocket ship of my desire, to live fullest every day, to fly free forever.]