Waiting for December 32nd

In high school and during the early years of my collegiate career, failures and rejections didn't bother me. Looking back, I think they didn't bother me because I never thought they were deserving results of my own inadequacies--they were always due to someone else's fault. I remember angrily calling my father after finding out that I barely scraped away with a "B-" on a mid-term exam, psychotically venting bunch of nonsense about how the professor didn't know how to grade the exam. My father was not--and still isn't--one to entertain nonsense, and his lack of sympathy only angered me further. I blacked out after hanging up, completely consumed in senseless and directionless fury, mumbling to myself that I will prove the professor and my father wrong (I concluded the semester with a "C" in that class).

My problem--as if I had just one--wasn't that I lacked passion. My problem was that I always thought I could start the "prove everyone wrong" tour the next day or the next week. As a young 18-year old, tomorrow was always guaranteed. The ubiquitous feeling of urgency by which I'm enveloped these days to look inwards after a failure was simply absent in my youth. Not having tomorrow as an option just seemed incomprehensible, and the guarantee of tomorrow meant that I could afford to be wasteful today.

These days, I am deeply and acutely aware of my own mortality. The fire that fueled my youthful energy--the fire that consumed me in my disillusioned reality in which I felt that injustice was everywhere--had long been extinguished by the fire hose that regularly soaks and reminds me of my inadequacies. Naturally, coming to terms with my own mortality granted me the ability to value time much more than I used to--in my youth, I was convinced that I owned my own time, whereas I now know that I'm simply borrowing time. Realizing I'm on borrowed time forced me to re-evaluate the value of the minutes, the hours, and the days. In my youth, I couldn't wait to close out the year and excitedly look forward to January 1st. These days, I spend each December 31st in calm silence, naively waiting for the day to turn over to December 32nd.

Even now, there are days when I wonder if my faith in optimism would be rewarded as I finally welcome the morning of December 32nd. When I have a particularly bad day, sometimes I harken back to my entitled youth, feeling strongly that my faith deserves to be rewarded. And on the even of yet another new day, as I feebly attempt to mask perhaps early signs of mid-life crisis with seemingly in-depth and thoughtful contemplation, I find myself subscribed to admittedly weakly-held conviction in the belief that I am where I am in life not because I had been faithfully and deservedly rewarded, but because I've stumbled into people whose company I've unknowingly needed but never deserved.