Finally Ready... Or Just Getting Started?

When I came out of high school over ten years ago, I realized that I didn't really know very much. At the time, I set out to finally learn something worth knowing and to find a life that was worth living. I thought that such a thing might be important for me to have before I decided what to do with my life. This was controversial to say the least. Many people understood this to be apathy and aimlessness on my part. They were right of course. That's pretty much what it was.... but at least it was "intentional" apathy and aimlessness. I certainly wasn't going to go live how everyone told me I was supposed to live without at least considering the possibility of alternatives first.

Looking back, I have learned so much in these ten years of wandering around and trying a little bit of just about everything. I am mostly in one piece and thankfully I have very little in the way of tangible success to show for all my effort. I've done so much and I have been able to remain pretty much a nobody. I have a decade of life experience and not much in the way of temporal distractions or accolades. In my odd little book, that really does count for something.

I doubt few can see that I have done a decent job of accomplishing what I set out to do (and at great personal cost it would seem.) Maybe now I am finally ready to live my life and direct myself towards a set of long-term, worthy pursuits. I know so much more now than I did before I deliberately undertook this decade of practical learning in the "school of hard knocks".

Of course, one of the things that I have discovered over the last ten years is that I still don't really know very much. In fact, the simple world that I didn't understand before has only proven itself to be far more complex and difficult than I could have ever imagined. Maybe that is the primary moral of this story. It has been a truly worthy lesson indeed... worth everything that it cost.