My Unregrettable Day

Is unregrettable even a word?  I decided that I could not live another day without knowing--so I Googled it.  What I found out is that there are others out there who have wondered the exact the same thing!  Not only did they wonder if it was a word, but they used it anyway!  Somebody even used it in the exact same way that I was planning to use it before I second guessed myself and used Google to ease my mind.  Maybe I just won't use it.  Mindjacked again! 

Who cares if it's a word?!?  Who gets to decide what is or what isn't a word anyway?  I know what it means, and so do you, right?  But what stopped me in the first place?  It was far too easy for me to want to give up on using a word that isn't in the dictionary because it would make me feel like less than a good writer.  A fear of failure?  Rejection?  Will all that energy that I spent second guessing myself pay off in the end because it led me to these conclusions?  Who knows?  But that voice has always been enough to stop me from even picking up a pencil. 
   
Ok, so, puttting my inner dialogue aside for a moment, my point is simply this--sometimes we all hear that voice inside of our head.  The one that can cause self doubt, isolation, procrastination, or get this--paralysis by analysis--leading to yet another thing on that long list of regrets.  It's nothing new.  Oliver Wendell Holmes must have understood this when he wrote: "Many people die with their music still in them.  Why is this so?  Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live.  Before they know it, time runs out." 

Reading that quote brought all that BS that's been running through my mind for all these years (and some of this post) to a screeching halt!!  Why?  Because I don't want to be one of those people.  We've all seen them, the guy sitting on the end of the bar talking about yesterday as if today doesn't exist, or the lady who keeps talking about what she wants to do with her life after leaving her oppressive husband, but never does anything. And I'm sure we all said the same thing to ourselves when we saw them--I'm not going to be like THAT guy or I'll never live like THAT lady!

Well guess what?  They didn't start off that way.  Maybe they started off with a dream, or with the high hopes of living a life less ordinary.  Whatever happened to them, at some point in their lives they decided that they were going to settle for something less than what they wanted in their wildest dreams.  They decided that a memory in the past was going to keep them anchored to a day that no longer exists.  They stopped moving forward, and it can happen to any of us...
   
Nope, not me, I said--I'm not going to be that way.  I'm going to travel, see the world, write the next Great American Novel, run with the bulls, study Kung fu in China, climb the highest mountains and sail the great blue seas!!  The world is mine!!!  Well, as time went by, I took a look at that list, and I haven't done any of it.  And the older I get, the less likely it is that I ever will--at least that's what "they" say. 

How depressing.  I can hear my music fading.  What can I do?!?  I'm not as fleet of foot as I once was, those bulls are gonna rip me to shreds!!  Why is it so dark in here?!?  My God, did those mountains get taller??  Forget it.  Those voices in my head are screaming louder and louder with every tick of the clock, and I can no longer hear the dreamer inside of me---tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick---I give up!

That's how it's been for me for longer than I care to admit.  Until today.  Today I realized something. I realized that all I have is right now.  It's the only thing that I can change.  I can't change yesterday, and there is no tomorrow.  I can either continue to build the unclimbable Mount St. Regret or I can climb over it, or even run right through it to get to where I want to be---which is right here, right now--fighting for my dreams with the desperation of the third monkey on the way to Noah's Ark!  I'm doing exactly what I want to do.  Today I am pursuing my dreams with a passion; refusing to let my music fade into the darkness of despair.  Today, I listened to Oliver Wendell Holmes, or better yet, I hear Red from The Shawshank Redemption when he said, "Get busy living or get busy dying." 

 More importantly, I stopped listening to that self-defeating voice in my head.  Today, I am living my dream...because now I know, today is all I've got---and I can use any damn word that I want---that's quite an unregrettable day if you ask me...