Silver not Gray

25 down 50 (give or take) to go. Call me morbid, that’s just how I work. I think of it as being a realist. I spent surprisingly little time dwelling on my impending death today, as I normally do each time a birthday rolls around. I figure that I went through my third life crisis last year, so I am cool until 36. That one is going to be tough because it’s the half way point.

Someone shared with me tonight that life is like a jump off the empire state building. When you first go you feel like you will be falling forever, but once you get a little ways into it you realize that it is all going pretty darn quick. That hit me at right around 20, and from what I hear it gets even quicker from here on out.

To tell you the truth, I am not real sure how I am supposed to be feeling. Not just about my birthday, but about my life as a whole. If I am being completely honest, I feel like I am at a pretty good place all in all. I think my goal in growing up (and I am officially grown up now, I can rent a car. In fact I can do anything I want with the exception of being the US President) was just not to disqualify myself from reaching my full potential. I wanted to be able to not have anything that I looked back on and regretted. It is funny but I feel like our generation no longer believes in regret. I really don’t think I have ever heard someone seriously say that they regret a major life decision that they had made. My generation has bought into this idea that all the bad stuff in our lives make us who we are today, and that we wouldn’t want to change that. Never mind, that so many of us don’t like the people that we are. That has always been a pet peeve. If I ever ask you what you regret most about your life, don’t tell me nothing. That is the most phony thing you can say. I understand that those mistakes played a role in your life turning out the way it did, but I know in your heart that you would do anything to have a few of those life decisions back.

For me, If I had to chose just one thing that I wish I could have back, it would be the way I treated my brother. He is not in a very good place right now, and has such abnormal behavior in his life that I can’t help but feel partly responsible. I wasn’t exactly your dream brother. We fought a lot, and I played some pretty dirty tricks on him. I remember once telling him that my parents wish that he had never been born. I think I told my parents about this before, and I know that I apologized to him the next day. I feel so terrible about ever convincing him about that. That’s the part of me that feels bad, and regrets my actions towards him.

I have a lot of other uninteresting things that I regret dong in my life, but my point in all this is that I do not feel disqualified. I can honestly say that 18 year old Thomas couldn’t have dreamed of things being this good. I am so excited about this second 1/3 of my life. I won’t even bother to dream what my life will look like at 50. I will trust that the Lord has it planned out. That’s good enough for me.