The only thing I want:

I want to love life. And I mean really love life. The kind of love where I want to skip in the morning when I’m barely awake, stay up as late as I can laughing, enjoy every single day just because it exists. The kind of love where I want to shower the world in hugs and kisses.
I just want to really love life. I want to be happy and joyful and hopeful. I want to believe that my best is good enough. I want to make others believe that they are more than good enough. I want to be the kind of person I sometimes mistakenly think I am. I want to be certain that the trivial things don’t matter. I want to approach challenges with a curious, unafraid, confident mind.

I want my heart to be open, my life to be full.

I want to love life, and I want it to love me back, too.

Even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions.

 

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

For the longest time, I wanted someone to feel this way about me.
I feel kind of awkward admitting I still really want to be loved for these reasons.
But aren’t these words absolutely beautiful?

This afternoon, I am inspired by this quote:

I learned to live many years ago. Something really, really bad happened to me, something that changed my life in ways that, if I had my druthers, it would never have been changed at all. And what I learned from it is what, today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all: I learned to love the journey, not the destination. I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get. I learned to look at all the good in the world and try to give some of it back because I believed in it, completely and utterly. And I tried to do that, in part, by telling others what I had learned. By telling them this: Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness, because if you do, you will live it with joy and passion as it ought to be lived.

– Anna Quinlan