I don’t want to wake up one day feeling my back stiffen and my body creak with the pains of age and wonder how I’d gotten it all wrong.

I don’t want to look over beside me and see the face of someone I’m only half in love with—or worse, no one at all—just because I was afraid of that great love. I don’t want to rise from bed and meander around my empty colonial wondering when it was exactly that I died inside.

And perhaps not everyone feels their unlived life as a virus in their very essence, but I do.

It’s not that I don’t need routine or that I don’t delight in some aspects of normality like dinner on the table for six and a kiss on the cheek when my love walks through the door—but that doesn’t mean this will be my life day in and day out.

Normality will be like sprinkles dusting the corners of the free spirit wind that I let take me from one adventure to another. To live happy in love is my life plan; it’s not any more complicated or simple than that.

I want to abandon the ratrace of materialism and instead live a life of purpose. I want to travel around this beautiful planet with the one I love making memories with, stumbling along the way and hopefully leaving people and places just a little better than we found them.

I don’t think this is meant for everyone, nor am I saying that this in anyway is superior to the lives that most of us live. All I know is that conformity is like death to my soul. There are some of us whose skin begins to crawl when we think about going to the same job for 30 years, where at the end of our career we would have accomplished nothing more than a pension and a card bidding us farewell.

We really and truly do get to create the lives that we want to live, and I’m sorry but I’m not too scared to chase my dreams. I will find this beautiful utopian life that I dream of simply because I’m crazy enough to actually do it.

There’s some truth that only those who are crazy find a way where others said there were none, and while I will never step on another to bring myself higher, I will skip in and out of reality breaking any rules that are meant to stifle the woman that I really am and the love that I have found.

What’s wrong with my life goals being to travel this world helping people? Or that I dream of watching the sunrise turning the brilliant sky tangerine across every continent, and that for me my life won’t be complete until I touch my toes into every ocean that swirl in blues and greys.

My life will be about living and loving and how to find happiness by following my own damn heart.

Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’ll have to change my plan a half dozen times. Maybe there’ll be days when I question everything, but at the end of those days, as I lay my tired head down, if I am happy and have love, they won’t have been days lived in vain.

There’s an aching within my soul that is pushing me beyond the conventional parameters for living, beyond the void where I’ve been told to never venture, and it’s there that I know the life I’m meant to live awaits me. My life will be judged by how many other lives that I touch, my purpose will be in how many hearts I challenged to grow, and I’ll leave a part of me within each pair of eyes that smile at me.

Because sometimes we realize that we’re meant for more than just following the rules.

I’ve never fit in, and I realize now that the greatest difficulties and moments of sadness I’ve encountered have been when I’ve tried to do just that. My eyes are bigger than the moon, and while my heart overflows like the gentle sea, the truth is my soul is just as deep.

My words may move people, but I want my actions to inspire. Perhaps I’ll disappear for a spell, somewhere between the equator and Never Never Land, but it’s not because this life isn’t real but only that I’m choosing to believe that life can really be this amazing.

Life can really be about living happily in love—if we’re brave enough to realize that it’s possible.

Maybe once in a while we grow into a type of consciousness and love that makes turning around impossible—like trying to return to Kansas after seeing Oz.

I’ve seen too much to ever play it safe with “normal” again, and while the fire that I make may burn me at times, there’s also no other way for me to live than to do it with my whole heart.

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Relephant:

The 4 Reminders that Turn our Minds Toward Sanity & Cheerfulness.

The Buddhist Notion of Love.

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Author: Kate Rose
Image: Author’s Own
Editor: Travis May
Copy Editor: Callie Rushton
Social Editor: Waylon Lewis