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.”

nostalgia

Aw shucks. The deluge of homecoming pictures on Facebook are to blame. I have a sudden craving for skim mocha with black & white cookie sprawled over the day’s Chronicle in Von der Heyden… And maybe also a book on Plato or two with my trusty macbook which has since died and gone to heaven, taking my four years of college education along with it. My brain already feels rusty.

interesting concept →

Volunteering your professional skills through a Catchafire Project provides service that is 10 times more valuable than an average volunteer’s hourly wage. We help you make the biggest impact possible with your limited time.

Sheryl Sandberg's Commencement Speech at Barnard →

“I truly believe that only when we get real equality in our governments, in our businesses, in our companies and our universities, will we start to solve this generation’s central moral problem, which is gender equality. We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.”

addicts

I had Mark change my password to prevent excessive facebooking as I prepare for the MCAT. Now experiencing withdrawal and thus dealing with my addiction by spending more time on tumblr. Self imposed paternalism is not working, and I’m just grumpy while looking at pictures of gastrulas instead.

:(

four years.

My own take on this senior column in yesterday’s chronicle.

At the beginning, you are all a little naïve. You overestimate your ability to write insightful papers and be good at music theory. Wonder if the friends you meet during orientation week are the people you will call and invite to your weddings in ten or fifteen years, and then never talk to them again. Think that you will major in biomedical engineering, biology, chemistry, and actually major in philosophy, music, math. Wonder if the boy down the hall will ever notice you, and then some how catch the attention of an unassuming upperclassman at a café, over lemon bars and James Joyce. Learn that relationships may end quietly, yet still heartbreakingly, no matter how improbably picturesque their beginnings. Then learn that the person you least expected to fall in love with might actually be the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.

Other lessons are more subtle, and some come too late: the importance of building relationships with professors and faculty members who want to share their worlds of knowledge with you, and to work with you, not just lecture at you. The importance of defining your own set of values, and being able to clearly articulate them. The importance of earning credibility with mentors and administrators who value your ideas and your perspectives. Of figuring out what you love, and doing it well.

You will realize that there is so much more to medicine than may be encompassed in talk about scalpels and needles and biochemical pathways - that it is also about empathy, and patience, and appreciation. Own up to the things you are bad at: math, engineering, drinking alcohol without turning bright red, swallowing your ego, and appreciate the things you are not quite so bad at: philosophy papers, befriending older and wiser peers, organizing quirky art competitions, reflecting, writing and cataloging. You will travel to India and Greece and England and France and the world will feel simultaneously smaller, and yet infinitely large. You will alienate those with whom you once spent many Friday nights laughing and cooking and watching Youtube videos with, and replenish those Friday nights with new faces, because people may drift apart for silly and fickle reasons. But forgive yourself. You will surprise yourself when you land jobs that you had long considered out of your league, and then stand in amazement as underclassmen start to look to you for advice.

And then, sometime in early May, you will realize that with one more paper it will all be over. Your thesis will be done and your plans for the summer, and beyond, in place. You will have bigger ambitions than what that naïve 17 year old could have dared to fathom in her wildest dreams. You are suddenly brave enough to email strangers who seem to have amazing careers, and are impossibly talented at soundbites, and ask them for their nuggets of wisdom. And then you will wonder if it has been enough, if it will ever be enough. Someday, hopefully, you will learn the value of contentment when finally, you tire of the upward climb. But for now, and for a while longer, you will remain easily inspired and easily enthralled. For this is how it feels to be young, in love, and truly fortunate. Today, the most you can hope for is just to be a little bit less naïve, and a little more thankful.