Ghosts

I dug this up tonight. It feels resurrected.

:: Originally written 12.2.2007 10:50 PM

At various moments in our lives we come upon the question, “What am I doing with my life?” As a child looking toward embarking in the adult world, we might phrase the question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” As an adult, we ask ourselves, “What did I want to be when I grew up?” We first catalogue the things we enjoy doing in our lives, and then translate this interest into a compatible way to make money under a circumstance that we can tolerate.

Once again, I have reached another crossroad in my life and have now found myself brooding over this very same question. Only this time, I have found myself stalling on accepting an answer just yet. It is very frustrating to feel myself at a stand still. Part of me urges a decision, while the other part poses more questions to process before I take a step forward. It feels very much like a paralysis brought on by fear.

I find myself balancing on the tip of my toes, straining my eyes to see what might lie ahead of me hoping to get a better view, or a glimpse as to what might be laying in wait along any given path I choose to take. I relax my heels and feel the earth on which I have been hinged. Looking back from where I had just been, I realize that no matter how far away something looked before, it never looks the same as you had thought once you have arrived. I close my eyes to see what this spot looked like from where I had just been. Comparably, they look different but feel exactly the same. Being there and looking here, and being here and looking there, I wonder to myself how I ever took a step in any direction at all. In fact, maybe I have not moved an inch, and while I have been standing here growing older it is the world around me that has changed.

I open my eyes and sigh. I must move on.

Something does not exactly feel right. It feels as if a ghost is haunting us all at the same time. We are afraid of it, yet know that it cannot harm us. Some argue that ghosts are invented by our thoughts, and harm could actually be accomplished if we believe for a fact that the ghost is real. After all, our thoughts are real, and they haunt us all the time. From birth, we are taught to fear this ghost through stories and legend. "If you don’t go to college, you will never get a good job." Ghosts are the great protectors of secrets. Ghosts are the paranormal, conjured by those who are beyond what we define as normal. We spend our whole lives avoiding them out of our fabricated fear of them. Ghosts do exist after all.

When I'm grown up, I will be able to conjure ghosts of my own. How exactly can I learn to conjure a ghost? Well, it’s simple really... my ghosts can only exist when people believe in them.