February 24

Quote of the Day

Someday, somewhere - anywhere -, unfailingly, you'll find yourself.

And that, and only that,

can be the happiest or most bitter hour of your life.

Pablo Neruda

We talk about this a lot with my best friend.

Figuring out who you are, what your life is about, what you want - what you should want, and where you're striving to go.

What is it that makes you happy? What is it that will bring you peace of mind, make you focused, steady, certain.

These talks are some of the most beautiful, yet most agonizing, ones we have. Discovering each other, but mostly ourselves, together, but mostly selfishly focusing on ourselves, is glorious, yet most of the time painfully misleading, discouraging, seemingly hopeless, or all-round ridiculous.

There are so many things that you wish to bring into who you are, so many people whose image of you you want to match, fulfill, mirror, whatever. There is so many crossroads where you wish you could split - or do you really?

It is difficult telling apart the you inside and the you under the pressures of the external. Or can they be told apart? Can they be separated? Are they - or have they ever been, even meant to be - separate?

Honestly?

I believe with all my psychologically biased and sociologically educated mind and my strong but silly heart that, whether you is you only when you are able to separate yourself from the expectations of you coming from outside or whether all that is outside and from the outside forms you just as much as all the you that is on the inside, discovering what you're made of and what you're about - finding yourself - will sneak up on you.

It hasn't happened to me yet, but the beauty of the moment - the deep, all encompassing sigh and relief that I trust come with finally knowing who you are deep down and with all that you are - is hugely reliant on the not knowing and frustrations along the unknowingness that come before it.

Until then.