Wait--But when is it ever timely?

When I first proposed the Grand Canyon trip to my mom, she agreed almost too easily.

"We practically have to pay nothing for your college; these couple of hundreds of dollars shouldn't be a problem."

And today, she suddenly questions me: "Why are you so hurried? Your life has just begun. You have more than enough time in the future to explore Grand Canyon. Why do you have to go now?!"

No, she is wrong. I don't have plenty of time in the future. It's not impossible that I simply drop dead tomorrow, get hit by a car, or fall on my head because of the slippery snow. And if that indeed happens, I will die without ever seeing what I considered the grandest natural beauty in the world. I've always dreamed to go to Grand Canyon--since forever--since the first time I saw it on photographs a long long long time ago. For plenty of people in the world, dreaming is all they can do. "I will go to xxx when I have time." "I will go to yyy after I graduate college." "I will do zzz once I get older."

NO. xxx, yyy, and zzz will never happen if all one can think of is "do" but "will do." These will-do's are for sure never going to happen. And these people are for sure going to die without ever doing the will-do's. I don't want that to happen. Now, my parents (or rather, just parent, because I haven't even told my dad yet) are supposedly not too harsh on money because they are exempt from the entire 50,000 dollars cost of college. I have the time right now. I'm done with college. And school can definitely withstand my taking a couple days of vacation during an actual break. Future? Who knows what's going to happen in college--would I really have time by then? I don't know what's going to happen. I might be too involved in the busy life of New Yorkers that I would have to push Grand Canyon year after year. And never get to see it. Again, if I had learned anything from the Japanese dramas that I watched a couple weeks ago--that is to embrace this present moment. Do it. Do what you want while you still can. Live the moment.

The following is a passage from Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail...Although it's not exactly about the same thing that I was discussing...the big ideas are still similar..:

"We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."