N.B. I know I said back in July that I’d be more consistent here. To defend myself, I tried. I even put a little post! reminder in my Google Calendar for every Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, life is hard and I’m often not as productive as I should be. But I’m here now!
Enduring Shithaca
I wish there was a way to capture those fleeting (for me) moments of time when you just feel weightless. When you’re fully optimistic and totally assured that you can handle anything life throws at you, because nothing life throws at you can really be all that bad. Everything’s relative, and joy is supreme.
I’m home right now on a few days break and it’s wild how much a change of scenery can alter my mood and outlook on life. My boyfriend says I’m too pessimistic about life in Ithaca, that things are wonderful, and I refuse to see the good. And I get that to a certain extent – I like to wallow - but there’s definitely something about that place that throws me off of my emotional course and brings me back down to earth too quickly. It’s also true, though, that at the end of living at home this past summer, I was desperate to get back to Ithaca and escape the annoyances of life at home. Every place has its bad associations. But for my life in the fall of 2018, Ithaca is my place chock full of bad associations.
But let me run back into the love and light of a bird’s eye view on life. The way I feel right now writing this is good and I feel assured. I’ll get a job, a great and wonderful job. In a year or so I’ll get a curly coat chocolate labradoodle. One day the new arrivals section on Shopbop won’t allude me and totally depress my checking account. I’m going to travel and complete every one of Condé Nast Traveler’s city guides. And eventually, even all of the actually big things I’m reluctant to write about here and now will resolve themselves, too.
I’m declaring all of that for myself because I really feel it, I really know it’s possible and has already been done. Just a matter of remembering it. That there is something better. Happiness is not only attainable but sustainable. Happiness should be the lens through which I view the world. The mess of life is always going on, and wherever you go, there you are – again, with that mess. It should be a requirement to see the good in every situation, or else any situation can and will become an Ithaca situation. Maybe in that way those fleeting moments become more and more frequent until they run together into one big moment - one bigger, better, brighter, happier understanding of all of the smaller moments that came before and are to come.