Living deliberately

I realized something tonight.

I have been spending so much time lately occupying my mind with love and how I risked it and it failed me, that I have been blinded to every piece of inspiration I once sought and believed in.

It's like pain and failure blur the edges of what really means something. I seek love and relationships because it was the last time i really FELT something, and i miss that feeling of vulnerability and passion. The fact is, though, that I felt vulnerability and passion towards so many things once. Not just love. But music and quotes and poetry and books and God.

After a while, the brilliant things we once heard start to sound the same. Things like seizing the day and feeling your moments, like how short life is and how blessed we are. And our hearts become hardened because we almost start to believe that we have heard it all. And instead of revisiting why those things meant something to us, we just brush them off because we have already felt them before.

It sounds so sad. Once you have been hurt it's hard to go back to that place of childlike exploration and excitement. That's why so many adults seem so hardened... it's because they have ghosts following them around. Ghosts they haven't been able to see past.

I remember being 18 and writing a journal entry about the power of teaching. And how, more than anything, I wanted to teach music so I could inspire kids the way I was inspired from it. I wanted to show them that music wasn't just something to be learned to satisfy teachers and parents, but something to be EXPERIENCED every day in a brand new way. That when life gets tough or unmanageable, music is a place to go to feel free again. And lately it is if I sometimes lose sight of the fact that the ability to do this is presented to me every day.

This opportunity to inspire has become a job, something to pay the bills and keep me warm at night, and I have let the edges of that dream blur with the passing of time and the monotony of going through the motions.But there is a different kind of warm, and it has nothing to do with security. A kind of warm that I feel sometimes when I let things go quiet, or when I watch a movie that changes me, or when I read a quote that reminds me of how brilliant things can be.

I call myself content but in reality I often realize that I haven't felt anything REAL in a long time, and that scares me and leaves me with a feeling of panic.

When was the last time I sat down to read a book instead of turning on the TV... or the last time I took a walk just to look at the sky and feel the air on my face?

It's like we get so CAUGHT UP in everyday life that we forget to live. And that's why I have been so desperately clinging on to memories of the past.

It was like when you told me the other day that I needed to create something new instead of trying to recreate my old emotions. With God. It applies to EVERYTHING and I feel like I just got that.

I want to be inspired again. I want to hear old quotes in different ways. I want to look at my life as an amazing journey (again a so called cliche) instead of waiting... waiting for something to happen.

It's just so freaking hard.