It's a time of change in my life, as it is every few months. There are new people in my daily life, new books, new ideas, new music, new adventures to be had, and new things to be learned. I've noticed two themes this semester already. One is getting out of this city and going on adventures--hiking, biking in the canyons, going to beautiful places that I haven't been to before, and going to beautiful places I already love. I forget sometimes that being in beautiful places makes me feel so much more real, more alive, more like myself, and without it, I tend to lose sight of who I want to be. The second theme of this semester, and somewhat related to the first, is figuring out who I am and what I want. I have spent the last 21 years absorbing countless new ideas about life and along the way, I haven't had much time to reflect on what those things mean for my life. And this means simply taking more time to think about what I want--while I eat breakfast, take a tea break, go for a walk, go for a bike ride, swim in the ocean...I try to imagine the life I want. And in my schoolwork, I've been able to tweak most of the paper assignments to be about my worldview, my understanding of the material and what it means for me, rather than doing my typical routine of arguing or explaining another person's point of view without actually contemplating what I think about it. And I'm really excited to do this. It requires a part of my brain I haven't used too much in college, and it is something meaningful to me.
Moreover, I'm surrounded by people who are full of life and joy and laugh at all my jokes and like to dance. And we have a pet rat who makes me happy. I'm realizing my relationships make life worth the rough days and rough moments and the poison oak and confusion and fear of the future. So do one dollar bottles of wine and cooking tasty food and planting sunflowers. Christopher McCandless may have been right that "happiness is only real when shared."
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