To live with purpose

I'm now only four months short of turning twenty. My mind wishes to stay young, always.

Yet, my body is aging. The years are now beginning to blur, and my childhood days grow farther and farther into the distance; beyond reach. Why is it that we believe that promise and potential lay only with the youth? 

It is a sort of cycle, woven by contradictory hopes; we are young only wishing for the years to pass, then we have aged only wishing to reclaim the times we lived in such neglect and heedlessness. 

I do not regret the life I've lived. I cannot regret the moments that have made it, that continue to make it to this day. Reading by the fireplace, engrossed in worlds only great minds can conceive, or resting under the lavish shades only an evergreen tree can offer, or the slows of bent heads and flashing teeth, the joys felt and witnessed with the ones we hold closest to our hearts, or every time I gently closed a book feeling a renewed sense and an even greater love for life, or in winter when the snowflakes would flutter around me, like butterflies, in a silent dance, and the times I stood atop a mountain where heights gave way to humility, and blizzards turned into breezes, and all the years I lived presented themselves before me as nothing more than a day. 

So I live. And so I shall continue to live and breathe everyday anew. 

In this journey, I believe most of us, if not all of us, are seeking a meaningful life. I do not want to have walked upon the shores of this world, only to turn and find that the sand has clung to my feet, but the land is bare of my prints. To live marked, without having left a mark of my own. 

I want to live with purpose, or to not live at all.