“Taking one’s chances is like taking a bath, because sometimes you end up feeling comfortable and warm, and sometimes there is something terrible lurking around that you cannot see until it is too late and you can do nothing else but scream and cling to a plastic duck.”
When you have a dream and it takes hold of you, what can you do? Do you run with it or let it go and you’ll be thinking for the rest of your life, what might have been. We had so many dreams as children. Where do they all go when we grow? Are they swallowed up by the mundane things of everyday life? Or do we lose them, leave them behind us in the dust?
If you take chances, and you mess up, you move on. You want to try something, and if it was a stupid thing to try, you look it in the eye and think, “well, as least I know not to do that again.” There’s no turning back. You apologise if you’re sorry, but you can’t cry over spilled milk. If you’re jealous, psych yourself out of it. If you have to lie to make everything alright again, lie like you mean it. If you find yourself stuck in a rut, stand up and jiggle your brains. If you think you love this person, you tell him or her how you feel, sometimes that’s all it takes.
And things happen— people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them or fall out of love, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. We are like water vessels. When the cracks start to open upand we finally can see one another, because we see out of our facades through the cracks and into each other. Before that, we were just looking at ideals of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside.
Some days our heart aches that we are not at ease with our world so full of strives and uncertainties. But isn’t that better than not feeling at all? Maybe we should be grateful that there is beauty in uncertainty. Maybe we should be comforted in the fact that the ache and confusion in our heart means that we are very much alive and human.
Sometimes we need to be more open to exploring the unknown, just jump on the wave and see where it goes. Those moments are often the most truthful.