Oppurtunity

As many people are fond of reminding me these days, I am becoming an old man. 30 is just around the corner. Funny, other than an extra inch or two on my waste and perhaps an ache or two that has arisen, I feel pretty much the same as I did 5 or even 7 years ago. My soccer skills have deteriorated significantly, but that's another story.

What strikes me today is this: What can we say about our lives other than they are typically defined by the choices we make, and those choices are usually a matter of either grasping or turning your back on oppurtunity. Oppurtunity is a fickle thing; here one day, gone the next. Unfortunately, oppurtunity is also often difficult to see. How many of us can look back upon those rare moments of significant oppurtunity only to realize they passed us by with only a whisper, and we never noticed. Very often we find ourselves with both eyes on the future at the expense of the subtle but perhaps life-altering oppurtunity that taps us on the shoulder in the present. I fear that for many of us life is what is happening while we are waiting for life to happen.

These ruminations are perhaps the result of my impending passage into that stage known as "midlife." As I age I wonder about oppurtunity. How many good ones I've missed, how many more good ones God will lay in my path, and how many I will notice.

I hope that one day I will look back at my life and know that it was defined by the oppurtunities I embraced, and not the ones that passed me by.