what better place than here, what better time…

…than now

title: guerilla radio – artist: rage against the machine

photos from picturesofwalls.com

I can’t guarantee that you won’t fail again. It isn’t within my capacity. But the mere fact that you have breath in your body means you’ve got the definite possibility that you won’t. With every moment that passes, with every breath you breathe, you’ve got another chance to turn it around. I don’t care how many bridges you may have burned in the last five years, five months, five days, five hours, five minutes or five seconds, or even if you have a lifetime of failures under your belt, you, right in this instant, have within you everything necessary to become even more than you’ve wanted or expected to be.

Hope isn’t a cruel trick, building you up only to dash you against the rocks once more. It is your ally. It is your fuel. It is what will keep you afloat until you can see for yourself that, even when it may not go according to plan, and even if it goes so far as to appear bleak and abysmal, your life counts, it means something and it’s going somewhere. That somewhere may not be what or where you thought, but that doesn’t make the destination, and, even more so, the journey, any less significant.

I can’t make you get back up or dust yourself off. I can’t make you stay in the game. But I can promise you, earnestly, sincerely, with everything in me, if you’ll get up, dust yourself off, stay in the game and completely remove "quit" from your vocabulary, there is nothing and no one that can stop you. You are bigger and badder than anything that would try to derail you, and you already know you’re bigger and badder than anything that has attempted to do so thus far. Look at you. You’re still here. You’re still breathing.

Give yourself the room and grace to find forgiveness and peace. Reconcile yourself to the fact that your 15-year-old self (or your 25-, 35-, even your 65-year-old self, for that matter) didn’t know everything. So what if you didn’t become or do what you thought you would have by now? For the love of all that is holy, throw the freaking timelines and constraints out the window already. Live your life. The one you’ve got right now. Recognize all those things you know to be true about the intangibles and put them into practice and become the "who," the real, true, earnest who, that you want to be. It is never, ever too late for that. Ever. And the fulfillment and success that has been that amorphous desire constantly nagging at you? It will be right on the heels of that, inescapable and chasing you down. Be the joy you seek.

We’re not in it for perfection or the idealized goals set for the mere fact we think their attainment will be the thing to make us happy. We’re in it for the living. We’re in it for this moment. This one right now. It is ours and it can’t be stopped. We can’t be stopped.

[because I needed to be reminded, too]