30 something

Is it called maturity when life grants you a new perspective on the world around you? Or is it maturity when you are still receptive from this new vantage point? Seemingly, my methodology in life has yet to bear any fruit. Success eludes me at every turn, nook and cranny. Happiness seems fleeting at best, and slowly, but surely, contentment seems to be the reasonable goal. My aspiration to write; it seems more a farce now than even a dream. A line I tell myself so ease the disappointment of inaction and failure.

Sometimes I feel like I get so caught up in the minutia of work, that I cage my aspirations and dreams and settle for the artificial walls around me. Success is easily defined by what perspective that you look at it. When I was younger, it was easier, because everything was defined on a sliding scale of A's,B's,C's,D's, and F's.

I think I finally figured out why they never had E's. E's are too easy to turn into B's. This coming from someone who knew a thing or two about changing grades on report cards.

As the grading scale has faded away, like the memories (and horror) of high school, I find myself wonder how to define myself, how to define my life, as a failure or a success.

I'm staying with my friend Jay, while I am here in LA. Of all my friends from high school, he is easily the most financially successful. It's so strange to think how divergent our paths are since we were together in school. Part of me has accepted the fact that most of my friends make significantly more money than I do. Part of me wonders if the choices that I made were the right ones and if it is too late to change.

Just hanging around Jay for a few days, I can see the difference in his life and mine. What he values, how he values things and how I value things. In the past, I looked down at his thriftiness. Now, as I see where he gotten to in life and where I am, it seems hypocritical for me to judge. I need the immediacy of purchasing things today; he practices patience in finding things on his terms at the price he wants. I live at the absolute threshold of my financial means; he lives well underneath his. When I look around his apartment, I think to myself, if I made the kind of money he did, I would have this, this, and this. But he doesn't. He could, but chooses not to.

For me it's like me learning to put back the pint of ice cream back in the freezer with some left, instead of finishing the whole thing.

Then, in turn, it comes back to how I define success and what I truly want with my life. Even though a part of me is envious of the success that my friends have, I don't want their lives. I want to be happy with mine. I want to be successful on my own terms.