Life hits me at the seemingly most random of times.

Sometimes like a train, sometimes like a flower petal; sometimes a cold shower, sometimes a flame.

When I feel,

When one-in-the-morning drizzle soaks into my bones and my fingers attempt to scrounge warmth that doesn't exist,

When steel guitar strings make my fingertips throb with discarded worries,

When my voice and the innermost parts of me sing together as if No One is watching.

When a smell reminds me of age 5,

When the scalding-hot water in my dorm sink nearly burns me while I'm just trying to do the dishes like the responsible adult I have been told I am (and I'm pretty unsure about that).

When my ears are surely damaged by the volume of my headphones but I won't turn it down, can't turn it down, because I love it,

When dancing is the only feasible option,

When I cannot sit still but cannot move, captured by the moment itself,

When a hand inside my chest clenches and twists something rebellious inside that never seems to quiet.

When my 19-year-old arms squeeze Doug the stuffed dog under shade of pure night and pure exhaustion and pure childlike heart-dom,

When this heart pangs for my mother,

When my soul pangs for God.

During five-hour study marathons at the library, I need reminders that I'm a human being, that no matter how school may make me feel, these pages, these grades, these expectations, these endless words and unanswerable questions are not me.

Watching the news and being battered with destruction, I need reminders that this is not normal.

Living as we do, in a rush, in a constant search for more, in a daze of receipts and paychecks and how many likes did this get and the never-ending buzz of responsibility, we need reminders that yes, this is real life, and indeed, we only get one of those on this planet, in this now (unless you believe differently, which is totally rad).

Being ushered through life by expectancy and assumption, I need reminders that no, I do not have to conform, that this isn't about them, or even about me, but something much larger. No, it is not wrong to dance to the beat of a different heart. Anything but.

To be struck by life every day for the rest of my earthly days, to never grow accustomed to numbness: this is my prayer for mankind. For numbness, defined by the dictionary as being deprived of the power of sensation, is to be deprived of humanity.

And this randomness, these sporadic flutters of I'm-not-sure-what, is not random, at all, in fact. These life-struck, love-struck, dazzling moments of conscious existence, these sparks of intense zeal like caffeine for the soul— they are my battle against grayness. Against complacency, against the blindness of settling, against being solely content. A battle that is not truly my own.

We weren't made for mediocrity. And not in the societal sense, either, but in the sense of truly living, a spectrum of breathing just for oxygen and breathing what you live for. Screw being content. You are not created as average; you were made to be in love, to be smitten with the heartbeat that pulses through your blood, to shout at the world, to twirl in the sunlight and the rain and all of the above, to cry like the sky, to be a ball of hurtling fire in a place full of ice. To glorify.

Life, living— it isn't random in the slightest. I know we all feel these flutters, and my plea is that we don't let the flutters fly away as they come. I am under full belief that we can live ferociously, that we can obliterate the gray, outshine monotony and dullness with an effervescent and constant state of my God, I'm alive.

Tap into your flutter, commit to a relationship with radiance. Until life becomes one big flutter, every day an exhilarating thing to wake up to. Until backpack-lugging to class, until pouring milk in your cereal, until the most outwardly trivial of actions compare to a wind-rushing roller coaster, simply because you are aware that you are alive.