what possibility is

Possibility. That moment: you stand at the edge of something new, feel the wind on your face, a taste of so much more out there, waiting. Possibility is standing on the rooftop of an unfamiliar city, with so much in front of you, everything so close and yet so small. It is the moment that the plane you are on takes off into the sky, and you can see everything below, the ground you were just standing on, get smaller and smaller until finally there is nothing but clouds and you know that you are really going somewhere else and this excites you.

It is at once wildly exciting and desperately frustrating. There is so much that you want to see, that you want to do, that you want to learn. Looking out at the world, at the future, at what exists beyond the horizon, still out of view...there is so much that captures your imagination, your curiosity. And at the same time you know that it is an impossibility that you will ever get to do ALL of those things, SEE all of those places, LEARN all that you would like to know. Even if you were perfectly healthy, perfectly motivated and energetic, and even if money was no problem, even then it would be impossible to do all of it in one lifetime. And when reality is more constraining still?

You want to travel to dozens of different countries on so many different continents. You want to see with your own eyes the wonders man has created and the places where the atrocities he committed occurred. You wish that you could learn enough to really be fluent in five or six different languages, three different alphabets. You want to do work that would challenge you, that would force you to research and write and write and more hands on than that too, to directly help. You want to go skydiving again. You want to go para-sailing. You have a list of dozens and dozens of books you want to read, to absorb. You want to try painting again. You want to try ceramics again. You want to write some interesting stories, some more poems. You want to take more pictures, pretty ones. You want to see and touch and stand inside building and monuments constructed in all the styles of architecture that so fascinate you. You want to experiment with vegan cooking; you want to actually be capable of enjoying it. You want to get more tattoos and sail on a submarine and volunteer.

There is so much to want, to see, staring out into that distance between the three rods. Dreams and possibilities that a blur into each other until all you can see is a great expanse of shining white light. Sometimes it inspires you. Sometimes you stare into it and cannot help but want to cry. So little, and so much, there, in front of you.