This evening after work, I sat on my kitchen counter and ate cranberry bread. It’s one of my bad habits. The counter, not the bread. While I ate my snack like a small child, two things caught my attention.
First, this note on my fridge. I wrote it a month or so ago in one of my more frustrated moments. Today, it made me realize that I am always trying to become something else. First I was a college kid wanting to become an adult, then an analyst hoping to become a teacher, and now a teacher wishing to become a novelist. It hit me, when I am I ever just going to be?
That’s when my eyes were drawn to my bookshelf that is messily filled with too many things. All those eclectic books and pictures are my life. Each title and each smiling face a different part of me. Another metaphor staring me in the face. A life that is already enough if I stop to pay attention.
Maybe bookshelves are the real windows to the soul…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to stop working toward that goal on the fridge, but I also need to recognize that even if I already were a full-time novelist, there would always be something else to become. If we don’t stop to be, life will pass us by…
Lately I have slowed things down, which means a more gradual approach to this becoming business. In some ways, this is hard because it feels like I am accomplishing a lot less. In others, it is allowing me to be the more balanced person I have already worked so hard to become.
Are you good at being? Tonight I am collecting secrets.
oliviaobryon 