It has been nine months to the day since I graduated, and I can’t recall a single day that someone hasn’t asked me when I am going to use my degree to get myself a real job. Everyone around me has asked this, and after nine months I’m beginning to think that maybe I am the crazy one. Are that many people really hardwired to desire your average life of commuting to some office everyday, day in, and day out?  Yes, I’m sure the paycheck would be nice, but I don’t see the draw to watching your life pass by whilst performing some monotonous task at a desk every day, just so you can afford a few comforts like a nice house and a nice car. Maybe in a few years when I’m older. Maybe I just haven’t grown up enough to understand the adult appeal. I’m still too consumed by wanderlust to desire anything but the bare necessities, so long as I can travel.

This is my all time favorite quote:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones that you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Mark Twain

That just about sums it up. I’m at a point in my life where I don’t have anything tying me down; I don’t have house and car payments, I haven’t started a family, I do have student loans to repay, but so long as that is my only responsibility, why shouldn’t I go explore the world? Why should I be in such a rush to tie myself down with a real job?  There’s plenty of time ahead for all that. Twenty years from now I will not regret not having a real job in my early twenties. I will be devastated though if I have an array missed opportunities to live life to look back on.

Today one of our long-time customers at the dive shop came in to return all his IDC materials. I’d never met the man before, but happened to be working on something at the front desk as he was talking to Greg. He’d had a brain tumor for a while, and it had been in check until just recently, but now the cancer had started spreading like wildfire. He had pictures of his brain scans with him and showed us how half of his brain was clouded over in a white mass. The three of us just stared at the image in an eerie sort of devastated silence, no one having the slightest idea what to say. He was the first to break the quiet and began to speak with a sort of desperation, a desperation to convey the message that life is short and sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it. Here was a guy who never smoked or did drugs or drank excessively; he jogged everyday, was a scuba diver and a mountaineer, the picture of perfect health, and suddenly at 40 (maybe even late 30s) he finds out he has brain cancer. “Enjoy life while you have it, enjoy the hell out of every moment of it. You have no idea how short it really is,” was what he kept saying over and over, tears threatening to spill from his bloodshot eyes. I’ve never been so moved by a complete stranger. I wanted so badly to walk over to him and give him a hug. He finally left and Greg and I just sat in complete silence for a long while.

I didn’t mean to turn this so somber. I just wanted to relate that this man, this total stranger, reminded me why I insist on being broke and traveling every chance I get, why I am in no great hurry to find my real-person job, why I am content being a scuba instructor who makes absolutely nothing. Traveling makes me happy. Traveling is my way of living life to the fullest. Life is too short to not do the things that make you happy, and to bet on the chance that you will be able to do those things later on…