This year has been a difficult one.

I was meant to post my Los Angeles travel diaries today, but all night I’ve been stuck. Stuck thinking about the state of the world, the world I live in. And within that, the smaller world I live in, the world of me, my friends, my family- the people I connect with. My Universe.

What part will I play in the course of history? My family history? What mark will I make on the world. Sometimes, I don’t feel like making any mark at all. Sometimes I just want to curl up in a ball and forget about the injustices that happen every day, the millions of people- men, women, children of all races- murdered, raped and tortured at the hands of their oppressors. There will never be peace in this world, I know that. Not totally. Not when this world is so vast and the people within it are so divided in their ideologies. All I know is that in my world, I can make peace. I can make a mark on my world and I can be something, someone- that makes a difference.

The question is how. There a lot of different avenues I could go down right now in my life. I just know that I’m at a point where I need to take one. I need to make a choice about how I want my world to be. And that’s not the same as making a choice about what I want to do with the rest of my life, because I don’t think anyone really knows what that is. But how I want to live my life, how I want to channel myself, is a choice I have to make.

2014 started for me in a state of grieving. I lost my friend. Joseph Elliot Goode. He died. December 4th 2013. And then everything felt like it was crashing down on me. I had been looking for a job for months and I was yet to find anything stable. I gave up on everything and used to spend days laying in the dark- trying to grasp the concept that my friend was no longer on this earth, no longer living. It still doesn’t make any sense.

The weird thing about grief is that it comes in highs and lows. I was at a point where I wasn’t sure how life could even continue. I don’t know how I got through it because now as I sit here, it appears that life did indeed continue. That taught me the hard and seemingly obvious fact that the world keeps spinning, no matter what. It sounds stupid, but when your world stops, it’s hard to imagine that the rest of the universe carries on as normal.

As I write this I reflect upon the tragic loss of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Temir Rice and the THOUSANDS of other names which I do not know. Tragic losses happen every day, injustices happen every day, and to someone out there,  Michael Brown was what Joseph Goode was to me. A friend. A friend who is gone. And yet the world doesn’t know Joe’s name, and no one knows the thousands of others killed at the hands of police brutality or brutality elsewhere. No one knows their names but that doesn’t make their lives any less worthy.

It just makes you think about things from a different perspective when you lose someone personally. You really understand- no matter how far the disconnect. Somewhere in the world right now, someone has just found out their loved one is gone. They are feeling what I felt December 4th, 2013- and although I will never know their name or their story, I know how they feel. I understand their loss.

Today, I learned that someone else in my world passed away. He was a friend to someone I love. He was their Joseph Goode. I also learnt a few months back that my grandad passed away. I didn’t even know him. I guess that’s what made me write this post.

Life is incredibly short. Sometimes I feel like we’re all just hanging by a thread- and we are. I need to figure out what direction I want to take my life before it’s too late and it’s all over in a flash.

The inevitability of death is all consuming, overwhelming- as is the inevitability of life. Even if I decided to move back home and spend the rest of my life a hermit, watching daytime TV and being bored, life would carry on. It’s like a river flowing fast and I feel like right now, I’m sitting on the banks- just waiting. Just waiting to jump in and ride the current somewhere, hoping wherever I end up is somewhere great, somewhere I am proud to be. This year I’ve spent too long sitting on the banks. I think it’s time to take the leap.

Peace & Love & All That Stufffff.

Neelz