Every week, one of my best friends and I exchange gratefulness entries. It's a beautiful and important way to remind ourselves of the good things in life and to embrace our lives as they are. For this week's post, I'd like to share my gratefulness entry as I wrapped up my trip.
1. I'm grateful for the amazing last two weeks I've had to see new cities, meet new people, hang with old friends, laugh and laugh, drink, have a tipsy kiss, walk around around and around romantic streets, eat delicious food, capture memories in my brain, and get to know the friends and loved ones that I know and that my friends know better.
2. I'm grateful for my mom, whom I still talked to every day on the phone to let her know I was safe and about my adventures.
3. I'm grateful for a wonderful job I have to go back to - and that although I feel a little bit of anxiety, I know enough to know that everything is going to be OK and that life is too short to overthink things about work.
4. I'm grateful for the fact that I had a really good trip with the friends I traveled with on this trip. Traveling can be a lot like living with someone - there's a lot of space-sharing, eating meals together, taking breaks from each other, etc. Some people travel better together than others, but in any case scenario there needs to be some compromise and emotional resilience - one of my big reflections/sentiments on how to do that more easily is to embrace letting go. There is something very liberating about the notion of letting go.
There will be little bumps and pinches on a day-to-day basis in life, and we have the power to keep moving through - and not get derailed - by the little bumps. Picture a big beautiful ship that stays the course despite patches of rough waters - it stays the course by letting those waters crash on it and roll away. That's something I want to embrace more in my life - letting a wave crash against me and wash away.
5. And finally, perhaps this is more of a reflection than a gratefulness entry, but I think seeing my friend get married, listening to other couples reflect on partnership/marriage, and even more broadly seeing friends and family spend time together has made me think more about how I build/think about my life. Up to now, most of my dedicated drive has been focused on work - it's what I care about, and it's (a large) part of how I identify myself. The other things in my life that I have and love - family, friends, health, romance, adventure, etc. are things that occur organically, and I spend time on, but I don't dedicate the same focus on them.
If I was drawing a portrait of my life's dedicated efforts as a city plan, most of the landmarks would be work-oriented.
And I don't want that to be the case. I never appreciated the value of purposefully dedicating myself to other aspects of my life - like family, or love, or leisure, but I think there is value in doing so. Even if it's only to remind myself that there are other landmarks in my life that are important to me - that the map of my life won't be dominated by Job 1, Job 2 or Job 3 alone.
While anyone that knows me knows I care about Love, I have always been reluctant to say that a goal of mine is to have a Partner in my life because I don't like the idea of feeling a need to check a box by having a Partner. Having a Partner does not complete you - I am not waiting to be saved by someone, nor do I believe that Love can save you from an unhappy life. Having said that, I think that for me there is some value in creating space (mentally? emotionally?) for someone else, and in articulating that it is important to me. That dedicated effort/space and explicit acknowledgement isn't reserved for career alone.
It's funny because I used to go on dates with guys and they would talk about how they wanted to focus on their careers in their 20s and then in their 30s start to think more about finding someone to settle down with. I thought it was so weird to compartmentalize your life like that, but maybe those sentiments develop organically as we get older. It's easy to be consumed with work when you're young and as you get older you recognize the importance of dedicating effort to the things you want, particular in areas that may have been previously neglected as you focused on your career. I know that you can't force love or be as concerted about it as the way you can with work, but what I'm getting at here really is more about values and the spaces these concepts occupy in our heads and hearts.
And so with that, I will (somewhat apprehensively) say that it is important to me to have love - the love of family, friends, and someone romantic in my life and it's something I actively want to draw into my life, make room for and build. Travel, whether within my own city or to a new place altogether, is something I value for its capacity to bring in fresh perspectives, tickle and rattle your soul, and breathe new experience into your life (acknowledging the privilege in valuing and being able to pursue this kind of experience). And finally this blog - my act of connecting with people, sharing vulnerability and reflections and ultimately creating spaces that are honest and supportive - is something I want to continue to grow and share with others.