Well, my first quarter of college has come and gone. I don't really feel any different; time does not seem to be slowing down or catching up to me. I wake up in the same bed I've woken up in the last 10 or so years of my life and I feel like each day is a dream I'm waking from and the only reality is today. I've lived over nineteen years and I feel the same sense of wisdom and purpose as I did the day before and the day before that. I've eluded progress.
Or maybe I'm just arrogant.
Anyway, I was thinking about LIFE late last night (actually almost literally 24 hours ago as now is currently 2:30 in the a.m.) and realized that to a lot of people life is just a simple equation.
L=RT
Where L is your life as the product of the rate at which you move through time. This equation simply means that life occurs for all people. It's a statement that the "R" in "RT" (or Rate of Time) is a constant. Because time waits for no man, time is a moving at a constant rate. "T" is merely the amount of time one spends alive. This equation is time for someone who simply lives, one who sees life as the period between birth and death.
Now the irony is that this is the EXACT same equation as distance
D=RT
Where the distance one travels is equal to the rate at which they travel times the amount of time their traveling. I guess that means that life is some sort of journey.
But life to me is very different:
L = RT(M)-m
Life for me is the "good moments" (M) all plugged into the time I spend in them, minus the "bad moments" (m). If I focus my time on the good moments I do not need to combine the good moments and the bad moments in the same term and therefore distribute the "RT" evenly. When the times I remember being my life are focused on M, then I can simply subtract "m" at the end.
That equation means that Life to me is the time we spend in good moments. Now that term is defined by times I'm being productive, I'm with people I love, I'm doing things I love doing, or I'm simply in a good mood.
That equation means that life is simply not the time between living and dying to me. I see life measured in something greater than time that can be given a greater value if applied the right components in a multiplier. This brings up one of my favorite all time quotes:
"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another." - Ernest Hemmingway
Trying to understand life is a vain way to live. It's virtually fruitless. Yet not only do I focus so much thought and time into comprehending existence or life as a whole, I'm majoring in it and planning on studying other people's thoughts on it for the majority of my college education. I'm contradicting my own natural thought process. Vanity has become my life, therefore I can be named and given purpose in vain.
That's keeping things optimistic!
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On a completely different note (this is a reflection blog after all), I miss being in love.
Well, I can't say I've ever truly been in love, but I miss all the things that came along with me thinking I was in love. It's an emotional state that I cannot induce upon myself. It's one of the if not the only emotion that requires another heart.
I'm at a loss of where to start...
I guess that I can say that for my purposes I can assume the emotional and mental things that were happening to me during this time was the ultimate product of being in love, otherwise these words (like many of my thoughts) will be in vain.
Music flowed from me more when I thought I was in love. Songs made me think differently then and it affected the words I wrote. I became more poetic, to the point where the poetry on the page became the poetry of my life. I guess the ups and downs I felt were all converted to words in my brain. My life was a poem. I saw the world through different eyes when I thought I was in love....and I can't get that back. Songs come up that still remind me of that time in my life. Every song somehow manifested itself into either me or my attraction. They are the only way I can close my eyes and be back there. It's probably not healthy for me to dwell, but every once in a while the chance comes and I take it for all its worth.
I think it was when I thought I was in love that my perception of home changed. No longer was my parents' address my home, but instead a person became my home. Since then, I have never felt truly at home. Luckily I've met so many wonderful loving people in my life that I've also never felt truly alone. In fact, the only place I feel truly alone is in my own thoughts and I quite enjoy the time I spend in them (hence the blogs so I can reflect later on my...reflections).
I miss the emotional roller coaster I went through where every little good thing was the biggest success to my heart, and every barrier an obstacle in my path towards of a beautiful goal worth fighting for.
I just don't live my life that way anymore it seems. I guess only time will tell when the next person will come into my life and affect me to that degree. I feel bad some times, that I can only love certain people so much. I'm almost (if not) always infatuated with people who aren't as good to me as many of my friends have been. My heart and my head are on two separate agendas. I think it's because my mind usually wins that when my heart finally takes over something, my thoughts become intrigued rather than frustrated that they are being disregarded.
When I thought about this previously, I felt like I should write so much more to justify my thoughts. As if quantity made anything I say more important. Perhaps I'm finally getting sick of reflecting on times come and gone. But I know there's going to be another morning where I pull up to my house sometime between 1:30 and 3:30 a.m. and I look up at the stars and take a big sigh. All we want is love. Yet the love that I seem to require is only when I can't understand why I should love.
I'm too tired right now to write anything else of any significance on this matter.
*Just made a beautiful playlist of Thrice, Switchfoot, Thursday, Jack's Mannequin, Moi, and the Spill Canvas
So dear reader, I thank you again. I'm fairly confident I read back over these far more than anyone else, so knowing that someone else might be gazing over these words at some point or another in their life brings me joy. No matter who you are or how well you know me (or don't), to some extent or another I do love you.
- Ian Charbonnet
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