Our Choices

For the past couple of days I was reflecting on the choices I made in my life. I don't mean the big choices, like moving to America or drop out of high school, but rather the small, often insignificant changes we all make every day. The little choices that end up ruling over our life whether we want them to or whether we even notice.

Since I cam back home after I finished my degree, I have been very idle both mentally and physically. Part of it is the fact that I feel like I have lost the dominant element of myself. My education, my school, and my community mean a great amount to me. In some sense, I feel like I have blossomed and come to terms with my limitations and my aspirations only while being present there. It would be odd if changes that essentially happened in me would be irretrievably lost if I moved away, but it does seem to me that I have left a part of myself behind, a part that will never materialize itself again. Some fundamental part of how I defined myself, of who I was, was separated from me and is only accessible through some deep channels in the mountains of New Mexico.

I felt the same way after I was forced to leave my high school in Wisconsin. I still believe that, again, I left a part of myself somewhere hidden in the frozen woods and lakes of Lowenwood. While I do carry my experiences with me no matter what, I don't feel the same way as I did when the experience was part of the real world in front of me. In fact, I feel essentially formless like someone who only sees blurry field of vision and so doesn't connect nor disconnect objects from shapeless colors. I am unable to think firmly and with deep sincerity about the person I have become. It seems—no, it's true!—that a sensation of a 'person' or 'becoming' doesn't easily come to my mind anymore.

And so I think about the choices we make, like staying inside the whole day, anxious of what may happen in the world outside of the four walls. Staying inside an apartment, inside my head, inside the person I think I used to be a mere couple of days ago. We resist change and especially one that comes from the external: one that imprints itself on us and shapes us like a piece of inconsequential clay. We follow the slipping flow of time, but only because we don't have a choice. We pray for something to happen to us, to wake us up from the limbo of our existence, but only because we can't make it happen ourselves.

Am I afraid of living or do I just not know how to do it? I think it must be the latter for I feel like I still possess the hazy memory of living and being present.