Leavings

Sitting in a corner of my apartment with all my belongings half packed in a number of boxes strewn all around me, feeling exhausted and sad.

Leaving is always a messy, uncomfortable, and often overwhelming experience. The arriving less so, since during the leaving you have been forced to pack and organize your belongings into sorted, filtered, and transportable packages, and because new places allow for exploration and expanding into which always feels great.

But the leaving. Maybe its because I get more nostalgic about places and things than most. Mark, for example, has no qualms about tossing and giving away everything he doesn’t regularly use. But I hold on to old clothes and battered picture frames and mistended potted plants as markers of experiences I have had and lessons I have learned in the process. Even though I have learned that clutter does not make me happy, and I tend to feel more liberated after getting rid of old knick knacks, the decision to throw things away is always painfully difficult. 

But leaving has another, happier consequence. Over the past few days I have been inspired to view the city I have called home over the past 2 years more from the lens of someone just passing through. I have been volunteering at amazing organizations all around town, and taking every opportunity to meet up with friends. Yesterday, on the way back from an amazing day working in the kitchen at the Boston Living Center, I stepped into the Trinity Church (that I passed every day on the way to and from work) for the very first time. I sat in some pews staring at the glowing, vibrant stained glass, and wondered why we have a tendency to put off exploring beautiful places that we live just steps away from until just before we must leave them behind. As creatures who crave “busy-ness” many of us use our schedules as excuses not to engage in many meaningful experiences. I have certainly been guilty of this, often citing how busy I was at work, or that I was too tired to venture out after a long week (more content to “just window shop” on Newbury street). But if I am truly honest with myself, the behaviors that I default to when I am stressed or busy are not the ones that actually improve my outlook and mood. It would have served me well to spend less time buying and returning ridiculous things from Anthropologie, and more time chopping an entire crate of mushrooms with fabulous and fascinating people that I would have otherwise never had an opportunity to meet. 

So, back to this leaving process that I so despise. I have much more packing to do, but in the interim I’m also determined to preserve this feeling that our time is always limited and fleeting. I am leaving Boston for now, but there will be wonderful new experiences to be had in my next home city. With the help of a less hectic work schedule, I am determined so “put-off” no longer, and engage, connect, and contribute with more intentionality, and always make time for the things that truly matter. 

life experimentation

Yesterday, I spent the day trying to channel the wisdom of simone de beauvior, by (finally) getting around to reading the second sex, and then discovered this blog about two friends who decided to date each other for 40 days to work through their toxic relationship tendencies (he is a serial avoider of commitments, she - photos in post below - falls in love too quickly). Both participants are very attractive, stylish, and candidly perceptive new yorkers (sort of the girl/guy you wish you were in the cooler, edgier version of yourself) and they’re both designers which means the blog is not just a blog, but a curation of typeface and contemplative GIFs in multicolor quirkiness. Which naturally, got me thinking about the frustrations of a moderately artistic person in a decidedly non-artistic career path, and how I need to find ways to insert more of this into my daily routine. But it also triggered a number of observations about my approach to relationships, and what we each bring to our own relationships.
I think the structure of their “40 day project” accelerated the “getting to know you process” and made me realize how important it is to notice our differences with others and to internalize lessons learned through expanding our worldviews. Its also interesting how learning about others necessarily teaches us more about ourselves.
 
For me, being with someone who is cerebrally logical and an engineer by nature as well as by background reinforces how much I love philosophy and words and abstract ideas. I have always been a bit insecure about the fact that I am bad at math and was a failed engineer in college. It took me a while to realize that the world would be a dull place if we were all good at the same things.
 
A memorable line to take along - “life is a series of experiments…when nothing goes right, go left.”