Notice
"I realize that you're just making conversation, but after the fifty thousandth person has asked you what you're doing after graduation and you still don't know, suddenly it's like you have this life deficit or something."
--*Andrea
1)Jared says people are more concerned with where you're going than with where you've been.
2)It took me a month or two after I heard him say it the first time to really see the truth of that.
3)Recently, I've noticed something else.
4)Not only do people care more about what you're going to do than what you are doing or what you have done, but we tend to define ourselves that way too.
5)Or maybe it's just me; I don't have any psychic insight into other people's skulls.
6)But I've noticed that when I'm on my way somewhere, sometimes I don't pay any attention at all to where I am at the moment.
7)And when I stop and look around, trying to make up for that, all of a sudden things are very different.
8)Say I'm walking home from a class at night--who I am is this student on her way back to her apartment to hang out with her roommates.
9)But if I stop--really stop, not just pause in my trek--all of sudden I'm just this person standing in the middle of the woods with a backpack on.
10)All I am in that moment is the thoughts in my head and the memories that I've made that day.
11)Nothing else makes any difference whatsoever: not my classes, my job, the million things I have to do, or even my roommates and friends.
12)It's funny; it's a whole identity shift based on nothing more than whether I'm in motion or not.
13)I was driving home from work on Monday, and the full moon was rising just a little while after sunset.
14)It was gorgeous, because the clouds to the west were dark against a light sky and the clouds to the east were light against a dark sky.
15)I pulled over to more properly enjoy it, and I saw fireflies flickering along the roadside.
16)I turned off the engine and got out, and suddenly I wasn't this kid on her way home from work.
17)I was just this person sitting on the side of a road in the middle of some fields, watching the fireflies.
18)For those few minutes, I didn't have bills to pay or things to pack, a job to find for the fall or work to do over the summer.
19)And if I had stayed there, or wandered off across those fields instead of getting back in the car and driving home, then that kid with the jobs and the bills and the family would have been lost.
20)I'm not saying that would be a good thing; I'm just saying that for as long as I wasn't moving, I wasn't that kid anymore.
21)I was just me, and the things that I had in my mind: awe, appreciation, and maybe a little bit of peace.
22)If all it takes to find ourselves--and that peace--is to stop moving every once in a while, maybe we should do it more often.
"Things could be better, yeah, but things could be worse
There's fast, slow, and stalled... no reverse"
Run Away