'Welcome to the Real World'

Re.al.i.ty. noun. The world or the state of things as they actually exist.

We leave for Czech tomorrow. Tomorrow! I do not know what it is that I am feeling. I feel that tomorrow is inevitable, and so there is no need to feel extreme emotions. No matter if I am terribly excited or terrified, it shall come all the same, and nothing I do, say or feel will slow it down or speed it up. So I'm leaving.

I have been wondering, though. I wonder about life and its rhythms and how we look at it. It is almost the end of summer, and people are going back to school. It is "back to reality" now. But the thing is, what exactly is reality? I remember traveling around the UK for England Term a couple years ago, and we would lament to each other how horrible it would be when we would have to get back to "real life." We knew we were living The Dream--traveling, reading and writing for three months--but all dreams end. But when I got back to the United States, it was all wrong. It was not "reality" as I had left it--I didn't recognize it anymore, because I had been altered, along with my sense of what "reality" was. Thus, I went through a few months of a bitter "reality check," trying to come to terms with my own country. Reality became warped--nothing was familiar, or how I thought it should be, at least.

The truth is, we can't go "back to reality"--we are always in it. We never left. It is what we choose to make of the reality we live in--whether or not it will become familiar is an entirely different matter. This next year in Czech will be reality for me. All the traveling I have ever done--it is reality. All the "staying in one place" I have ever done--it is also reality.

You know, we live far too much in the future. I do, anyways. It's always, "Next week I will start eating better." "Tomorrow I will call my parents." "Next semester I will really start taking school seriously." Do we honestly think that "reality" will wait to happen until we want it to? Who says, "I am not really living my life right now, what I'm doing now doesn't count"? But that's our mentality. We think that when we reach a certain goal, age or season in life (graduation, job, marriage), that's when life "really begins." Bollocks. Live life now. You have no excuses. Reality is now, and you will always be in it.