New Year..What Does That Mean

Calling all the idealistic souls and the dreamers of us. This one’s for you.

It’s a new year. The celebrations of 2014 have come and gone, and it’s been a few days into the new year already – long enough for the confetti to be cleaned up, for the work days to drag on, and for the usual pace of life to set back in again. More importantly though, it’s been long enough since the fireworks and excitement for the “newness” of the new year to fade. And where does that leave us exactly?

We get such a sugar rush from the “newness” of the new year. It happens every time. I mean, who doesn’t? We get romanced by the “new year, new you” slogans, captivated by this intense rush of excitement and adrenaline. And understandably so. But, it’s been a few days into the new year, and we’re finding ourselves back into the same old routine that has dominated the past few years. We’re waiting for something to happen, something that gets our hearts beating and our blood pumping. That zest of life. But in the mean time, we’re living this idle life of waiting and wondering, and as each day passes and each new year’s confetti falls, it’s the same old thing. It happens to the most idealistic of us, those that have fiery imaginations dreaming up that perfect life we’re waiting to live. Join the club - its membership is only on the rise.

The Passing of Time

Old friends fit like a comfortable sock, like a fluffy sock that just slides back onto your feet after several months and fits perfectly. The seven of us best friends were back together again tonight, and we all fell back into our comfortable spots, wiggling back into where we fit best. We were like puzzle pieces, conjoining back together again to form a beautiful kaleidoscope of laughs.

My one friend said one thing after we had all left though. She said: "I see us changing. Not necessarily bad, just different." 

But, we were a puzzle. We were, no we are, unbreakable. 

And yet, she concluded by saying "People are made to change. Change is the only constant in life."

We were unbreakable. 
I hold onto the hope that we still are, because that sock fits like the perfect fit, and it is a warm place to be. 

Interactions

Perhaps it is a result of this lack of sleep. Perhaps it is a result of a burdened worldview. It's isolation, while wanting to be connected. Bored when together, and yet longing when alone.

Interactions with those around me leave me feeling breathless. Almost trapped. Trapped by my own greed, my own idealism, and my own need for recognition. And I can't expect that from the world around me, and thus that leaves me hanging amid two sides of the chasm.

I have come to this realization: I am a living contradiction.
I constantly want to be somewhere I'm not. I should engage in where I am. I long for connection and relationships, and yet in the presence of others, I feel fear and walls and retraction.

It's isolation, but fooling the rest of the world with a smile.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

That "thing"

I wrote this to a close friend over Facebook in one of our typical long conversations…

"Having been at college my first semester, i've realized that there's so much about myself that is a really big question mark of haziness and there are a lot of contradictions within myself that I can't keep living with. I've always grown up with piano, and even though I wrote about it in my college essays and it was my "thing", I don't know or I don't think it's that one thing that I'm truly passionate about. I had to fill out a short bio at the beginning of the year at my research assistant job in the Human Computer Interaction lab, it was a short bio like "hi my name is Jen, I'm a freshman studying Information Systems, etc etc" and the last part we had to answer was "if i had a whole afternoon free, I would…" and I was reading the responses that other people came up with, like "i enjoy hiking and fishing", "i enjoy cooking, listening to rock, and playing the sax in jazz bands", and it wasn't a moment of crisis for me, but i realized I didn't know what I would put. Like people have those things that they could do for hours and not feel the passing of time and just get completely lost in that thing and they find so much joy and satisfaction in it that if they had a whole afternoon free, they could point to that and say "god i would kill to have an afternoon to do that for hours on end and it would make me so happy"
and i want to find that, whatever that thing is. and yeah, my dad was telling me about his coworker who discovered an intense love of astronomy and telescopes when he was in his forties. he bought a telescope for his son, his son never touched it, and so he picked it up and started dabbling with it and the rest is history, he reads books and books about it, goes to conferences and talks about it, and it just brings his life so much excitement, and i think it also makes him a more interesting and distinctive person, it formulates part of his identity. and i want to figure out or find what that thing is, some sort of direction or purpose or excitement in something"

…I wonder how he will respond. How does one respond to something like that?

Inspiration

Blogging. Is that what this is called? Writing. Is that what this is called?
I have attended a ridiculously preppy boarding school, and never joined the posh literary elite that ran the school's literary magazine, never joined the school newspaper, and would never have called myself "a writer". And I can't really call myself that now. What have I written but merely a few lines of words on a blogging website, with an empty page and an anonymous source. Who will even come across this page of mine?

Then the question for myself remains: do you love doing it if the one thing that keeps you going is recognition? If you can write, and have no one ever read it or recognize it or stumble aimlessly across what you've produced, and still have a pull or an urge to do it - there, then you've found your love. So I suppose then, that this is a test. And I like tests. They teach me things about myself, who I am, and what gives my life a purpose.

That's what we're all trying to figure out here anyway.