Shirt: UO * Cardigan: H&M * Pants: Kenneth Cole * Scarf: gift * Shoes: GC, thrifted * Pin: vintage, Christmas gift
I can hardly believe we're already in mid-February. Time is absolutely flying by. Despite the unbearable cold this week, we're supposed to get temperatures into the 40s next week. Spring is apparently just around the corner. This spring will mark my survival of a fourth winter in Chicago. This strikes me as amazing in many ways. When I moved to the city, I never thought that I would stay for more than a year. As soon as coursework for my graduate program was over, I planned to leave. I moved to Chicago, four years ago, never thinking it would become my home. And yet that is just what it has started to become.
I've been thinking a lot lately about plans. Life plans, both big and small, and the ways that they manifest (or not) in our lives. In a number of ways, the life I am living now is never one that I set out to live, back when I was a teenager deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up. This isn't to say that I have a bad life; I don't. My life is wonderful, on most counts, but it's still a life that my seventeen-year old self wouldn't be able to recognize as her own. Most facets of my world right now are ones that I couldn't have even fathomed back then. And maybe that's the point. Maybe, despite all our planning, hoping, and reaching for tangible goals, we'll never really end up at those places, exactly, because life gets in the way. Life throws unexpected curveballs, and you react to those things in ways that can change your life, push it in a new direction, one that you hadn't considered before but that might be just as, if not more, thrilling than your original ideas.
I was always a planner. Not necessarily someone who plotted out my life for 10 years (though I guess that did happen occasionally), but someone who thought a lot about the future, about where and how things were going to go. I think it goes along with my bed-making, outfit-sketching side. There's a comfort to knowing what's next. But I think that it would be good for me to let go of that tendency, just a bit. Not abandon it altogether, and surely not abandon setting and reaching for new and loftier goals (to me, planning and goal-setting are different things), but rather appreciate the fact that my life will go where my life will go. Accept and celebrate the parts of the unknown that have been known to stress me out. Be happy in the knowledge that at each of those curveballs, I'll make the decisions that are right for me, and take my life in the direction that is best.
Don't you just love this vintage pin??!? My mom gave it to me for Christmas (it's one of a pair), and I'm absolutely obsessed with it.
It's been a long, somewhat difficult week, and I'm sure all this reflection has to do with that. It has felt exhausting at times and trying at others, and I'm so ready for a few days off, with slightly warmer weather and the company of my boyfriend, to take a moment to breathe. I'm even hoping that Joe and I can take a long walk this afternoon, since I'll get off work at around noon and he'll get into town mid-day. I want to go walk along the water, stretch my legs, and feel the cold February breeze coming off the lake. And feel happy that for the fourth February in a row, I get to feel that breeze and see that lake, even if I didn't think I would.
Happy Friday, bloglandia! Oh, and did you see? I'm featured on the lovely Kendi's blog today, talking about why I remix. Check it out!
Title song: Dave Matthews Band, "Everyday"
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