"Live your life Travis, don't be a curator to it."

I heard this while watching the Travis Cunningham film Pedestrian. While the film was typical Canadian fare, it brought to mind something I had been thinking about lately.

It's so easy to sit on the sidelines and watch life go by. At least it is for me.

In a similar type of quote, which was found in the latest Iain Banks' novel, one of the characters said this:

He glanced at Alban. I thought I'd have all this stuff figured out by now. I feel rather cheated that I don't, that I'm having to start thinking again about things that - as you say - one might have expected to leave behind in one's teens.' He held his glass up to the light. 'I think I am like a lot of people, you know: I've spent my life waiting for my life to start. It's as though one needs permission from somebody - parents, God, a commitee of one's peers; I don't bloody know - to finally take responsibility for one's own actions, one's own life. Only the permission never comes, and gradually - well, gradually for me, I can't speak for others; maybe their realisation comes in some sort of sudden revelation and a blinding light or whatever - gradually you realise that it never will come, that the way you've lived your life, stumbling through it, winging it half the time, is all there really is, all there ever was. I feel cheated, because of that. I feel, sometimes, like I've cheated myself though I can't see how I could have done much different.

Introspection is actually a good thing. It motivates me, that's for sure...