After a three year hiatus, I wonder what has changed

My life is a series of close calls, constantly punctuated by 'almost disaster' after 'almost disaster': a last minute trip to the embassy followed by a hurried take off to an unknown land, a summer internship without which an entire year of college would have been rendered useless, a last minute deferment of fees, a hurried one hour registration for classes. Close calls at the bus stop, close calls at the airport, close calls all around. I wonder whether these close calls stress me out of invigorate me, I know that I have often felt that my life would be intolerably boring where it not for the continuous current of perils that have beset me. I look back on the last 5 years of my life and can clearly see that the most uncertain of times are also the times when I felt most alive. It almost as if there is an adrenaline surge in my system as my survival instincts kick in and suddenly I can put a lot of things that seemed so important into perspective.

I often joke that if I had been given the opportunity to plan my life I would have learned absolutely nothing. Thats because I would never have purposeful planed peril into my life, and without peril and the attending opportunity to over come it, it is difficult to see which important life lessons I would currently have in my arsenal. I hope you don't misunderstand me though, I am in no way bemoaning my life as some singularly troubled experience. I am very well aware of the fact that I am probably in the most fortunate 5% of the worlds population as far as opportunities for self direction and self development goes. As a good friend of mine once said, 'If God were to put all the worlds troubles into one pot then redistribute them equally, I would be begging Him to give me back my own troubles'. I am simply saying that I have had man a time when I felt like my life was quickly spinning out of control, and those have turned out to be some of the richest times in my life.

Does it therefor make sense that if still get that jolt of anxiety whenever I am faced with a new challenge? Even when the challenge at hand is minuscule in comparison to what I have over come so far, I still get flustered at the possibility of failure. I wonder if it is because with each of my past successes I have gain something new to worry about loosing. Let me explain: when I was worried about getting into a good high school, I was primarily concerned about doing dad proud by attending his High School Alma Marta. Where I to fail, I could always go to another high school and do just fine. Contrast that with failing to get a job post college graduation, now failure means wasting a very expensive college education, creating financial burdens for people who have already given so much for me, inability to give back to those who supported me or give forward to other who may need me. Loss of a pear group that I have grown accustomed to and even possible deportation. Maybe all this things, all these responsibilities keep raising the stakes just enough to ensure that when the next close call comes around I will be just as anxious about it as the last one