What if You Are Wasting Your Life?

Think about it!!! #thinkaboutit #lifethoughts #life

Life is short. This is the kind of thing you tell yourself on a Sunday evening as you sit on your threshold, breeze soft on your skin, thoughts crowded by the discordant sounds from your neighbors’ generators.


Life is the sound of hurried strides, feet briskly marching towards curtains waiting to be drawn. It is a passing thing. You forgive the cliché because the night is too thick and your heart is too weary to bother with things like syntax.
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In your hand is a blinking mobile device, its lighted screen drawing you again to that
Facebook notification, memories from 5 years ago, when dreams were built on the landscape of trust, where time had not blurred your convictions and certainty was calculated on spreadsheets and goal plans.

Seated there with hands gripping your phone, a perfect metaphor for dreams snuffed to death, it occurs to you that this is how life is wasted: with nostalgia from memories ferried on social media and the wistfulness with which you now navigate this current situation. A wanderer, drifting through life with longings, your hands too weighed down to do anything about it. Sadly, this is me. It is not a reality that stings like cold water on bare skin. There is no surprise to this sense of lost time. I have carried my dissatisfaction with me for as long as I can remember: it sits in my belly and sometimes crawls its way up to the tip of my tongue, seeking words to articulate dreams begging expression.
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True. In this age of strong women and power achievers and young tech millionaires, no one trudges through life with half dreams and distant memories and expects to be taken seriously. Yet, here I am, in your face, telling you that life is happening, and if you are not careful, you will pack yours in a bucket and pour it away – like a soiled, wasted thing.

It is now easier to admit this though, because lately, my time has been engineered to crack through the giant wall of fear and escape the drudgery of mediocrity. You see, I have always wanted big things. I want to take the world and do with it things I dreamt of as a child. I want to make a difference in a way that is simple and tangible and measurable. I want to fly in a way that defies natural laws. I want to touch the sky and have a taste of freedom. I want to live this life, rich, full and on my own terms. But instead, I sit on my apartment veranda, gathering my thoughts and planning another blog post and life is happening still, with the inevitability of a good movie that must come to an end.

And I know how this happens: in small installments, compromise after compromise, a career of postponements, where ambition exists only in future tense.

True. No one wakes up with plans to squander their day, or week, or month. Still, it happens, life slowly escaping us in minutes and moments, with every ‘not now’ and ‘next time’ we offer ourselves in the quiet of the night. With all the ‘not ready’ and ‘not enough’ we whisper to our hearts, until one day the excuses rise so high, they drown the voice of our conscience.
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So maybe this is not just me. Maybe it is you too. Maybe there is something in these words that sing with familiarity. Maybe beneath your layers of middle class sophistication and upward mobility is an idea that has been folded and filed for the right time. Maybe you are waiting to be all set and ready, with enough funding and resources. Or you are waiting for perfect inspiration and a blue cloudless sky before you set off to the future of your dreams. Maybe you are even right, and these things matter – crossing tees like the patient and practical generation.

But while we are trading on maybes and the daunting weight of uncertainty, let us remember that one thing is as clear as the gold of the sun and as sure as the crack of each dawn: life is a treacherous thing, soft like the mist of smoke, drifting out of our fingers and away from us.

So forget the clichés, this is hard fact. You only live once, don’t spend it all behind a desk if all you want is to see the world. Don’t settle for feeding your belly when your spirit is as hungry too. Dare the odds. Take a plunge. Life. Is. Short!
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