Pan Syndrome

           

My friends are getting hitched right and left.
It is one heck of a scary sight, but I suppose everyone goes through this sort of matrimonial audience stage. My friend told me he was going to propose to his then girlfriend, now wife, while we sat in a gymnasium at a summer camp he was working at, and I had that sort of gut drop thing go on.
I knew that if any of my friends were going to get married any time soon, it'd be them for sure, but I was still a little shocked. Lots of people who hear about them or their wedding have a common initial reaction, "They're so young!" "How will they get by?" or "Oh boy..." But the truth is that their age wasn't what scared me. It was my age.

Their readiness for that next step in their lives woke me up to the fact that such steps were going to be on my front porch in not too long, whether it be marriage, college, or career. It seems that I am prone to every mortals complex: time.

I have Pan-syndrome. My deepest desires, which can only come to pass with my deepest diligence, are pawned off for fear of failure in my mind. When I think of what I hope to do in my life, the creeping doubts subtly redirect me to want to be free from responsibility. I find myself wishing away things I normally enjoy being a part of so that I can......... the logical thinking usually ends there. Growing up is the fear, and like the flying, green-clad boy from the Disney movies, it's easier for me to just be elsewhere (mentally).

How does one even go about growing up? I think it's easy to say it just happens, but I do not like the idea of just getting by, to just scrape an existence off of this earth as I wish I was something else. Like most of my pondering on life, time, and the inescapable, I find myself settling on these facts, which regardless of the life after, or the week after, are true.

Life is lived one breath at a time, and I am rich because of those breaths God gives me.

I have this awesome chance to live a life of abundance, and finding out what it means to run the race. Thank God we grow as we live. If we didn't, we might be stuck in Neverland or some other place where we never get to see what life has to offer, and never come to understand the worth of each breath.