Immersed

I’m sitting down on the couch with golden light streaming in, about to start a book. Like usual, I nestle in to read someone else’s life, someone else’s story. I’m enthralled with stories, with people, with the human condition. Why do they do what they do? How do they become the people they become? What are their greatest triumphs and fears? It’s why I was too curious for my own good as a child. It’s why I can spend much too long on Facebook tracking statuses, photos, wall posts. Even the smallest moments make me smile. The pictures that tell a thousand words have me clicking away. It’s why I subscribe to a couple hundred blogs—most of them regular, daily life blogs. Tragedies, achievements, joys, concerns—I’m obsessed with them all. I live for stories. It’s why I want to be a writer. It’s why I want to be a journalist--a newspaper reporter. The most basic of all storytelling covering the important, the minute and everything in between.

But this fascination is limiting. It needs to be reigned in at times. It needs to be molded and crafted. And most of all, it needs to be paired with the most important thing of all: passion for my own life. What good does it do me that my heart weeps over every house fire, every drowning, every sad story? I’m fierce with my emotions and my love for other people. But how can I honor lives that have been cut short unless I fully live my own? I love to read these stories. I want to impact people by writing them. But I need to stop looking around and look at myself sometimes. I need to be similarly obsessed with finding the joy in the little things of my very own life. I need to dedicate myself to reflection on my own life experiences, not those of others. I need to LOVE my life and my story before I can truly love that of others. I need to nurture this trait of listening to my thoughts and writing them down, instead of always turning to things other people say and write or fictional worlds I can immerse myself in.

This year, 2012, I want to become immersed. Not in my work or in my relationships, as important as those facets of my life are. But most significantly, I want to be immersed in life. I don’t want to skim it's surface. I want to be completely covered in saltwater, tossed in the waves, flung across the shore. I want to live and I want to live fully. Some people have a word they decide to focus on and reflect on over the span of a year. "Immerse” will be mine. I need to take the time and the passion to live every moment, every joy, every disappointment, every celebration. I only have one life to live, and too often my attention is distracted by everyone else’s moments. These are my days. And I intend to treasure them.

"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" -Thoreau