Welcome to Now.

Life is not perfect, it's actually the furthest thing from perfection. Life is a convoluted slide show of things that have happened and places that you have been. It's full of disparate experiences and difficult lessons learned; unfinished business and secrets you wish will never be uncovered. It's everything or nothing, depending on how you look at it. Life doesn't have expectations or a definition, just a long series of asterisk's followed with references at the bottom of the page explaining exactly what you mean and what you've been through. What you live is the trials and the tribulations. The arguments and the apologizing. The break ups and the make ups. The I love you's and I hate you's and I'm sorry's and the I mean it this time's. What you live is ups and downs, wrongs and rights. Being alive is believing you have failed several times over, again and again, only to finally realize that all of your mistakes and missteps have given you the opportunity to succeed. People always say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but that isn't necessarily true. What kills you are the chances that you didn't take and the decisions that you didn't make because you were too afraid of that oblivion of the unknown. What kills you is having reservations about becoming something different because you have become too comfortable with settling for what is, no longer aspiring for what could be. It will be slow and sweet, and a diluted perception will make it seem tragically appropriate. But it isn't. Life is about being stronger before something kills you, before anything makes you feel dead inside. What should make you stronger is the irreproachable ability to change when you aren't exactly sure what to believe in, but are positive that the one thing that you can believe in is you. It makes you stronger to be able to laugh, to cry, to feel vulnerable, to feel special, to feel hardship, to just feel.

We are all here to just feel. Whether it's something, everything, or trying to momentarily feel nothing at all. The greatest mistake in life would be not to allow yourself to be hurt, confused, anxious, or angry, because as a result you would never be able to understand love, dedication, peace, or happiness. My goal is to leave a mark somewhere on this earth, even if it's just an affectionate smirk on someone's face when they remember me or reminisce on a precious time that we had. That's all we can really ask for, posterity taking a longing glance at a photograph or a piece of writing and feeling somehow inspired, nostalgic, or having that bittersweet pang of wishing that you were still around to enjoy the frozen moments. We are merely transient beings in this world, desperately attempting to become eternal, hopelessly chasing immortality. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with dreaming beyond our means or dreaming bigger than what other people believe that we are. The reality of dreaming little equates to the actuality of being infinitely smaller than the possibilities that exist. People say that you shouldn't validate yourself through others, but ironically there are many times that others can teach you how to see the validity of yourself. The results of that are immeasurable. Life isn't perfect, but live it. Just live it.