Everyone makes mistakes. It’s the part of life that scolds, then offers a forgiving embrace with a bit of added wisdom. For 18 years, I made many errors in too many of my life’s chapters, imagining it was as simple as I had always thought. But what I didn’t know was that the biggest mistake of my life would eventually lead to a revolution of the unknown.
Growing up in suburban North Carolina didn’t offer much of the unfamiliar. From sixth grade until high school graduation, I attended Catholic school, spending a good deal of my youth spent in the moral equivalent of a bomb shelter. I held sacred one set of ideals, one high-maintenance girlfriend, and one firm idea to avoid the unpredictable and untried. Back then, I looked upon my life with the thought that I had figured it all out, and then the walls I had taken so long to build came tumbling down.
Two months before graduation, my girlfriend of two years and I split. At first, I cursed the world for prying a hole in my airtight theories. No longer did I feel assured with the routines or safe inside my own perceptions. Life suddenly came at me, furious and frenzied. My parents, wonderful people that they are, believed I was in the midst of some teenage hormonal meltdown and offered any assistance they could. But, unbeknownst to them, I had to face my crisis unaccompanied.
And then I relaxed, opened my eyes slowly and banished my failed philosophy, marching forward into the unknown, not forgetting the past, but not fixed upon it either. I threw away regret and saw the beauty of life that I had been missing. Stepping into that foreign territory, if only for a moment, illuminated the mistakes I had been making and it also showed me a means to change.
New friends became part of my life and new ideas crept into my head. I realized that assembling each person’s unique awareness can create a grand mosaic, a pattern capable of teaching profound truths. Humans are social creatures. Isolation can be refreshing, but only through interaction with the unknown could I have arrived at the happiness I feel now.
I want to remain an idealist, but one whose optimism comes with each new discovery, someone who awakens each morning and counts the possibilities in clouds, trees and other limitless things. It took a long time for me to step outside of my own skin, but after I did, I never wanted to crawl back in those superficially secure confines. It is in the unknown where I found my salvation, my reaffirming belief that life grants as many second chances as needed.
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