“Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be. I don’t want anyone I know to take that terrible chance. And the only way to avoid it is to listen to that small voice inside you that tells you to make mischief, to have fun, to be contrarian, to go another way. George Eliot wrote, ‘It is never too late to be what you might have been.’ It is never too early, either.”
Love in the Present Moment
Throughout my life there have been periods where I can’t make much sense of anything. I go to therapy, I read books and articles, but I still feel this sense of being lost and surrounded by this big cloud of uncertainty.
I start second guessing who I am and where I’m headed and just feel very distant from purpose. I get up, go to work, come home without really understanding what it’s all for.
After stumbling around for months, I’ll find my way back to words. While they have not shown up on this blog for some time, I have been eeking out scribbles in my journal…mostly questions like, “Am I on the right path?” “Is it time for a change?” “How can I carry on?”
I have been thinking so much about the future lately and whether I’m really setting myself up for the kind of life I can fully inhabit and enjoy. In my desire to create some perfect plan (or exit strategy), I miss the moments that are happening now.
As much as I still would like to know where I’m headed, I’m learning to enjoy the small everyday things until the fog clears. Enjoying a cup of fancy tea that I bought in NYC on a work trip. Laying on the couch with my boyfriend and running my fingers through his hair. Reading old love letters and poems that have been sitting in boxes for years.
I found this in an email that I wrote to my boyfriend almost 3 years ago (back when emails dared to be so vulnerable)…
We are here for a time and then we die, so we might as well try at something we really love while we’re here. We might as well push ourselves and chip away at achieving exactly what we set out to do. To experience flights of power and profound disappointment. To live at the height of our potential and not shy away from all that we are and desire.
Perhaps I will never figure anything out, but I will keep trying and I can love while I’m here.
Spark
Spark
A phone call
A tap on the shoulder
A tweet
Spark
Two people moving in the night
Two minds meeting
Two hearts feeling all the feels
This is what it feels like to
Spark
A new trail
A new year
A new relationship
Let it light up the world
Let it set this world on fire.
Back Home
“It’s interesting to think that no matter
how far you are from yourself,
no matter how exiled you feel
from your contribution to the rest of the world or to society –
that, as a human being, all you have to do is enumerate
exactly the way you don’t belong – and the moment
you’ve uttered the exact dimensionality of your exile,
you’re already taking the path back to the way,
back to the place you should be.
You’ve already found your way home.”
-David Whyte
The Well 