"What better way to die, than in the pursuit of your passion?"

Only the good die young.

Great song. Enthralling sentiment. I am one vaccine (a polio booster shot, to be exact) away from completing this damned Peace Corps application. Months. It's been months in the making. Several months, and over a thousand dollars. Am I right in being disillusioned? Is it going to be worth all this?

I digress.

I wonder, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't often, if my fate is already sealed. I find it difficult to envision myself as elderly, or even middle-aged, no longer as wonderfully mobile, elastic and sharp. As we all do, I wonder what it might be like to die, the moment of it. I realise one doesn't "wake up" from death.

I think perhaps I'll die young, somewhere far away from home, maybe even in Asia, or thereabouts, while I'm off fulfilling my duties, trying to make the world a better place. Or, having completed that task, with a pack strapped to my back, on the way or in the middle of some sojourn to another end of this earth, rattling along via, rail, sitting at the center of a crowded city square, on the trail in search of a body of water by which to rest my head.

I've resolved to work, as hard as possible, to be who I AM, not simply who it seems I should be.

It could be that this Self is immortal. Then again, it could be that immortality rests in what others think of as unrealised potential, as a book with its final pages torn out, the game of chess left arranged on a half-played board.