It Takes A Long Time

It takes a long time to kill a man

55 years at least

until he breaks down 

starts to look underground

and go off and get him some peace.”

I want to die a lot quicker than that

if it’s my only way out.

I’ve been counting up the cost

getting up on that cross

I want to know what this is all about.

A friend of mine, Peter, talked to me about this song during my sophomore year of college.  It’s Jon Foreman (Switchfoot) “Resurrect me.”  He’s talking about the mid-life crisis.  I personally don’t have a lot of experience with these sorts of crises but I’m trying to have mine sooner rather than later.  My perspective is that we have the dreams, goals, ideas, things we live for, that we spend a lot of our resources chasing after.  Maybe we get there and maybe we don’t.  We spend more time chasing though than developing the goals well in the first place.  Then after a while of chasing, we start to wonder why we were chasing what we were chasing in the first place.  A new set of priorities moves in and replaces the old set.

I have definitely had those goals and been chasing them quite systematically.  My senior project, my major, my university, learning Germany, studying abroad were all steps leading up to my goal of developing athletic shoes.  As an intern now at PUMA, I find my goal drawing rather close.  As college draws to a close, I will have some big decisions to make.  I could take a job at PUMA and reach my goal.  I mean, who doesn’t like achieving goals?  Or I could re-evaluate my goal.  Even now I am beginning to step back again and look again at where I am going.  I don’t want to get 20 years down the road working at PUMA and then notice that there are more important things I could have and should have been doing.

I realize this is pretty vague, but that gives you an overview anyway of what’s in my head.  I’m not at all sure where the thought process will lead yet but you can expect to hear more about it over the coming year.