Catch-22

What does it mean to feel your mortality at age twenty-two?

By 22 Gandhi had three kids, Mozart had thirty symphonies and Buddy Holly was dead.

That quote from "Remember Me", a movie I saw a few weeks ago, has been haunting me. I can feel every day slipping by without my doing something. Something great, or memorable, or lasting. In theory my very existence changes the world around me, but I desire more than that, and I have to ask myself why. Biology tells me that my early twenties are physically the best years of my life. I'm lithe, strong, enduring, flexible, capable of so much, and yet I'm allowing this time to slip past and around me like a ghost, and I won't get any of this time back. Ever.

I look around me at all the things others have done by the time they were my age, and I feel insignificant. Do I want to "do something" with my life just to have something to point to so my poor ego can compete? Or is there a deeper reason?

All this is not to say that I'm not enjoying life in this moment. I've had so many moments of awareness and mindfulness lately; enjoying the feel of my muscles straining during a run, feeling the difference in temperature between sunlight and shade, watching two people great each other after a long separation, concentrating on my breath as the split second between past and future, philosophizing on the nature of love underneath the stars.

But these lighting bolts of thought on mortality keep striking when I'm unprepared, and they keep me awake at night. All of my planning, my making money, going to New Zealand, seeing friends, working for Heifer....everything seems....so far away...so insignificant...and so self-serving, considering that it seems like the only thing worth doing is making this life better for others and the ones who will come after.

Gandhi said that "almost everything you do will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."

Right now I need to believe that he's right.