Last night I watched I Know What You Did Last Summer. By now, most people who care about the movie will have seen it, so I really don't have anything to post about the movie itself. It being a film from 1997, which was the same year I started college, made me think a bit, though.
Any time I see a movie from when I was a teenager, and especially a movie where the actors play roles near to what my age was at the time, I get a weird feeling like it represents opportunities that I did not take in life. I get the same feeling from home movies around the same time period. I do not know why that is because I don't know what sort of opportunities I could have taken. I did everything as I felt I should, and that period of my life offered a lot of challenges I wouldn't want to face again. It's not like I want to be an eighteen-year-old freshman in college one more time with the prospect of having to relearn the life lessons of the next three or four years.
I think my issue is that, even though there weren't any specific opportunities that I wanted to take at that point in my life, my path was not set. Everything represented opportunity. Every decision could dramatically alter the rest of my life for good or for bad. I think most of the choices I made in that time and since have been the right ones, but they transitioned from opportunity to responsibility, as is the way that life goes for pretty much everyone, and lost their excitement.
What is weird about this all is that I am actually young enough to realize that dreaming about opportunities missed is ridiculous because I still remember what that time period was really like. I think I understand the people who are older who want to reclaim their youth, but their youth was so long ago that they do not realize they are remembering an idealized version of their youth rather than the reality. If they were actually transported back to their real previous selves it would be torture, but in their idealized mind it sounds heavenly.
What I need to do right now is structure the rest of my life so that I feel I took every opportunity that I should have taken. The drawback is that that may require I do things that I usually avoid, like making resolutions. We'll have to see where this goes.
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2 comments:
I like this. I encourage you to look for opportunities and more so, pursue them. You never know what is waiting around the corner! :)
love your post...life is a road that often places us on the crossroads and I guess either way we choose, we choose a path that may be viewed as an opportunity. all the best to you...would like to follow your posts if u don't mind ^_^
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