"There are moments that I feel, suddenly, lucky and thankful and shocked at how happy I am.
I have called this the hardest season of my adult life, which it is, and it's not what I had
planned in the least, but it is also a secretly beautiful, special season at the same time.
It's hard, because some relationships still feel broken, and because we have no money,
and because I am afraid, sometimes, about the future, but at the same time,
I surprise myself with how okay it is and how okay I am with not knowing exactly what
will come next." -Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines
A year in and I still don't know what I'm doing in Colorado. The whole reason I moved out here in the first place was because I just knew I was supposed to. There was something here for me and also something deep in my intuition telling me to go and find it. I used to think that a strong intuition and the sense to follow it was something that everyone had. I have since learned that is not true and in turn learned to trust it even more, not without discretion, of course. After all, if you know me, you know I have a flare for dramatics from time to time. But if we are all just being honest here, which I think we are, some days it feels like my intuition led me here, dropped me off at the welcome center, wished me luck, and kept driving.
A lot of the time I have no clue what I am supposed to do now. I'm clueless. And I'm not talking Beverly Hills, Alicia Silverstone, matching plaid outfits kind of Clueless. No, I'm talking about the clueless that if you think about it for too long you start to get that deep gut fear that you hope you're not wasting your opportunities and your experiences and your life because you don't even know what you're supposed to be looking for.
I started writing this post exactly one month ago and boy have things changed. Not changed in like I know what I want to do with my life kind of way but changed in like the its funny how quickly the ebb and flow of contentment and anxiousness change. Even though a month later I still don't feel any closer to knowing why I moved here I am in a season of serious ease about the whole thing.
I think over the past month or so I have started to feel my roots grow more here. Sometimes it can feel like they are growing here but maybe at the expense of them becoming shallow in other places. I started practicing yoga a few weeks ago. In my never so humble opinion, if you can find anything that makes you dig a little deeper into yourself and reflect on what your outlook on life is at the moment, I think you need to hop on that train as quickly and as often as you can. That's what yoga has been doing for me so I can dig it.
Anyways, tonight as I was laying in Savasana, AKA corpse pose AKA laying on your back with your eyes closed and palms to the sky AKA the way I sleep every night, my mind started to do what its not supposed to do and was wandering, but what can I say, I'm a ~*~ReBeL~*~. I'll take you through my train of thought now, try to keep up. I started with thinking how good it feels to just lay on your back on a wood floor, what if I slept on the floor?, I hate sleeping on the floor, James slept on the floor in college, I miss Meredith and James, I still haven't sent them a wedding gift, I have a whole year right?, were they registered at Pottery Barn?, I should ask Stephanie what their house looks like, I miss Stephanie, woah, she is a business owner now and I don't even know what she's doing, I should talk to her more, I feel like I hardly know her anymore. And right about then is when the flood of fear and sadness welled up in my heart and my eyes and would have come pouring out of my eyes if it weren't for the "eye pillow" AKA the bean bag that smells like lavender that was resting on my face.
And there it is. The shallowing of the roots. So sneaky.
So how did I respond to that fear and sadness? I did what any other mid-20's, single, American girl, that secretly likes the fact that she doesn't have much of a social agenda does and got on Pinterest until I forgot a little about how scared I just got about losing touch with the people that I hold so dearly to my heart. But then, somewhere in between 100 ways to decorate with mason jars and the DIY's about repurposing a wooden pallet into any and every piece of furniture in your house, I realized hiding, trying to dispel that fear with tutorials was doing nothing to honor the fact that I need those people in my life. That if anything I need to sit in those feelings until I am compelled by them to act, to reach out, to bridge the gaps in geography for the sake of people that remind me of who I am while I am trying to figure out why I am here.
I finished reading the book that the excerpt at the top of the page if from a couple weeks ago. Its from a book called Cold Tangerines and is written by one of my favorite authors and I would recommend it to, oh, i don't know, EVERYONE! When I read that part I felt like she had captured so much of how I feel about this season of my life. I still don't know what I'm doing in Colorado. Sometimes I might know in part but definitely not in whole and I am perfectly fine with that because I feel a freedom to still be figuring that out. I feel fine with not having certainty of what the future holds because of the roots that have grown here in the last year, but in some strange way, I mostly feel fine because of the roots that I already had when I got here. I don't know how to explain that and I won't try to but I do know, I need those roots. We all need those roots. And I don't always know how to keep them from shallowing. Tonight it looks like a desperate email letting some people know that they are vital to my wellbeing. Tomorrow it may look different. Either way, I think that effort is important and worthwhile and beneficial in order to embrace what life has for each of us.
