Lately I’ve been feeling hungry for the ocean. I ordered some photo prints lately, and made the mistake of hanging up this picture right beside my bed:

So now every day when I wake up I roll over and see the Pacific Ocean, and I’m like… aww… I miss the ocean.

It’s funny, I came back from Australia a year and a half ago and I haven’t really felt that way since I got back, until the past couple of weeks. Perhaps that’s because Ithaca has its own great natural beauty, and then Philadelphia was new and exciting, and then it was winter. But now it’s spring, and I miss the ocean.

I’ve been feeling restless lately. Things have been going very well at work, which is wonderful, but there’s so many places that I want to live in my lifetime, let alone visit… I struggle to balance that restless urge with the need to stay in one place long enough to deepen my skills and grow a community.

My hunger for experience leads me to want to move quickly and to rush through life, seeking novelty and easily becoming bored; but there are also experiences that one can only get from slowing down and staying in a place, a job, a relationship long enough to really let things deepen and settle in, and I want to know that kind as well. It’s just that… I feel young, and I feel like there isn’t time — like one day all of a sudden a switch will flip somewhere in my brain and I’ll never want anything to change again.

Which is probably bullshit, of course. But I feel like I need to experience all of life before that happens, so that I don’t miss anything. It’s like that thought: Live every day like it’s your last. Well, there’s so much that I want to do before I die. I want to live on the West Coast and in New England, I want to experience Europe and South America, I want to write books, I want to make art, I want to become really fluent in Spanish, I want to ski a double diamond, I want to hike the Appalachian Trail from start to end. And I want to have a career too, I want to make things that help people in their lives, and I want to have money so that I can do good things with it. I want to buy my high school a real computer lab, and fund scholarships for other people like me who want to make something of themselves. (Not to mention doing all of the things listed above.)

There isn’t much time if I want to fit all of this in. But it’s difficult to think, what can I do tomorrow? What can I do the day after that, to make a small part of all this come true? That’s what I need to start doing, though.