Advice

I met a kid today on my smoke break outside the store. He rode by me on a bike, shirtless with a back pack strapped tightly around his shoulders... i assumed he was a transient. He asked me for a smoke and I obliged, to my suprise he parked his vehicle and started to talk to me. His name is Chris and he's a 19 year old going to the local community college with no real direction... I smiled as he shared a little bit about the uncertainty of his future and where he should go...

I told him to explore, not to limit himself while in school to some arbritrary degree...i told him to take classes he'd never imagine himself taking before...to stretch and bend and try it all out... I told him that college was really about finding out what you wanted to do with your life, through a process of elimination- by finding out what you don't want to do. and then i couldn't help but think of the quote I once heard in a narrative song:

Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

In all honesty I am a bit jealous when I meet those younger than I... because at times I wish that I could be 19 again... with the world at my feet... I realize i'm not yet a senior citizen, but the pressures I feel at 26 are vastly different from those of a 19 year old...

It was interesting sharing some of these ideas with Chris, knowing in the back of my mind that I was facing similar struggles in my own life... Our cigarettes burned out eventually, I shook his hand and wished him good luck...and he was off...