Swimming Upstream

Note: This was originally composed sometime prior to August 2015. I saved the draft, but when I edited and updated it, the original date was deleted which makes me sad. At any rate this was my original "back to blogging" post. I didn't publish it at the time because I thought it was cheesy. I know this because I left myself a note at the end of the draft that said so. 

I've been thinking of blogging again for some time as a way to practice writing. I wanted to start a new blog rather than pick up with an old one, but until I decide on a direction, I'll stick with here. It has been so long that I feel very rusty so for now I'm just going to throw down some thoughts and see where they lead me.

A couple of metaphors have been stuck in my mind lately. Our garden is very overgrown with weeds. We've neglected it. Becca took some artsy pictures in it to put on her Instagram so even though it didn't provide a lot of vegetables, it did provide a weedy backdrop for her photo shoot.

So as I looked at our weed-filled garden, I thought how life is like a garden. It starts out with so much potential and so much expectation. We dream of a bountiful harvest. We have great expectations for our lives, too, dreams and goals that we hope to see fulfilled. Sometimes like weeds in a garden, stuff happens in life that prevent some of our dreams from even blossoming. Our lives gradually become so overgrown with busyness that the dreams of our youth are forgotten or choked out.

Having reached the age of the mid-life crisis, it seems very clear to me that lives should be lived deliberately, intentionally, on purpose. We rarely do that though. Oh, I'm sure some people do--the artists, poets maybe. Looking back, I wish I had. But we are bound by our principles, beliefs, mores and sometimes we choose a path that leads us further and further away from one of our dreams until it fades into the recesses of our soul where it languishes or lies dormant. Perhaps we pursue other goals. Perhaps we can's see the forest for the trees and let life just happen to us until we wake up one day and realize twenty years has passed and our dreams became moldy with time.

We can start living deliberately at any point in our lives. We may have to find new dreams to replace some of the old ones that are no longer accessible to us. We can start now. Immediately. We don't have to let another day pass in which we just drift with the current. Swim upstream. Like salmon. I want to be a salmon.