What's the Rush?

Yesterday, I watched the movie Up for the first time.  It is about two kids who grow up and get married.  They spend their life together, creating sweet and beautiful memories.  The wife, Ellie, always told her husband, Carl, that she wanted to go to a place in South America called Paradise Falls before she died.  However, they didn't make it before her death.  So, Carl set out on a journey to go there...and take their house with them so that they could finally be in Paradise Falls together.  It was an adorable (but sad) kid's movie...but it changed my perspective on a lot of things.

The movie made me want to grow up.  I want to get married.  I want to have children.  I want to be done with school.  I want to travel around the world with my soul mate, to places that I have only visited before in my dreams.  I want to make life-long friends.  I want to have a beautiful life.  And I want it now.

I feel as if I am just a kid trapped in the Quad Cities.  And I am yearning to get out.  I want to get out and experience new things.  I don't want to be bossed around.  I want to be my own person.

But, hold on, wait for a moment.

I am in the Quad Cities, it is my home.  I do want to get out, but everyone I love is here.  I do want to experience new things, yet I can do that anywhere.  I do not want to be bossed around, but when I think about it, there will always be someone who has the authority to tell me what to do.  I do want to be my own person, but...I'm only in the process of it.

Yes, I do want to grow up.  But, what's the rush?  There's plenty of time.

But I need to find out who I am first.  And the only way I can do that is to live my life at it's best right now.

I may not be able to get married or have kids.  But I certainly can work on my relationship with my boyfriend now...and trust God that we will make it to that stage someday.  Maybe I can't be done with school right now, but I only have one more year of high school and then college.  I can work on becoming smarter, learning about everything I'm interested in.  I can't travel the world at the moment, but I can plan for when that day comes.  And save up money, for that matter.  And friendships don't just come with a blink of an eye, I need to work on developing them and making them work.  And maybe I don't feel as if my life is beautiful, but...it is.

At the end of Up, Carl found a scrapbook full of pictures of him and his wife.  She left a note for him saying that he needed to go out and make his own adventure now, not live in the past.  This relates to me, except flipped around a bit.  I need to live now, not in the future.

It is about being happy with the life you have, not with the life you want.

That's when life becomes beautiful.