A Few Random Thoughts…

I often go downtown and sit in a cafe and write for hours about random things. It’s therapeutic. Something about a good cup of coffee and maybe a cookie or scone just gets the words flowing, I guess. Anyways, here’s a couple of paragraphs containing observations made during those long hours staring out the window, sipping a mocha and watching the people walk by. I feel like these capture the essence of some of the cultural curiosities that stand out to me as a teen in today’s world.

What is it about humans that longs to be loved? When we’re children, our parents’ love is enough. As we grow, we start searching for the love of true friends, and eventually, we long for the love of a soulmate. We all go through a phase where we don’t think we’ll ever fall in love, we don’t think we need it. Eventually, though, that wears off, and we’re left with an aching desire to be loved in a way that only that one special person can love us. We crave companionship. We want to be truly known and understood. Why do we desire that so much from other people, when we can get it unconditionally from God?

 

Jocks, nerds, hipsters, emo kids, they’re all defined by one or two things that constitute their “label”. Real people aren’t like that, though. Real people have a bit of everything in them. I love watching and playing basketball, but that doesn’t make me a jock. I love it because of the people that taught me to play, the people who first watched it with me. I love to read and do schoolwork, but that doesn’t make me a nerd. I love it because I have a longing to learn and understand. I am not one label, I am a mix of many. Real people are a mix of many labels, they cannot be contained. They are divergent. They do not conform. Real people have differences and similarities beyond the obvious.

This last one was definitely inspired by my own escapism, as I have a tendency to attempt to disappear from my day-to-day life. Often writing serves this purpose, writing and some good music from a bygone decade, but I’ve observed the desire to ignore life and hide in a fictional universe in so many other lives as well. I felt it deserved some attention.

Humans have an interesting desire to escape from their own reality, and dive into someone else’s fantasy. Perhaps more now than ever, we throw ourselves into movies and tv universes in an effort to distract from our own reality, our own story. We idealize the fictional world, because everything is seemingly so perfect. Artists create stories, perhaps, to heal their own pain. An adventure into what could have been, perhaps, or a fantasy of what we wish could be true. I find myself drawn to the simplicity of life in stories, the simplicity of good versus evil and the good guys always winning. I long for those shining moments of untainted peace, the uncomplicated tales of everyday life. In truth, life is never uncomplicated, and never untainted. Life is hard. Everything seems so easy in movies, and we use their simplistic worlds to escape from our own.

I definitely enjoyed putting together this post, it’s sort of a peek into what I think about/write about while I’m hiding away by myself with a pen and my notebook. Some of these things are interesting to think about. Also, I highly recommend spending hours in a coffee shop or bakery and writing or daydreaming or doing whatever you do… that time to reflect has been invaluable for me and helps to slow things down. I’d go so far as to say that taking this time to chill and write has almost made my life a little simpler.

Chasing Slow

My mom bought a book for my older sister, asking me to give it to her when I see her in two weeks. Intrigued by the title, I sat down to read it and it was the best decision I’ve made all week.

I have to start by saying that Erin Loechner is an amazing writer. Her words flow together so nicely, technically speaking it was a really easy book to read. I guess I found her writing style to be similar to the way I think, casual but eloquent. I can only hope my own writing will one day be as smooth as that… Anyway. Ranting about how the words are strung together aside, the words themselves hold an important message.

The title of the book, Chasing Slow, might just be two words, but it is the perfect description of what the book is about. Erin describes her own journey to embracing a life of less, a slower, more meaningful lifestyle. She uses her own experiences to illustrate the importance of letting go of control and allowing life to just happen.

Erin implores her readers to discard the calculating, mathematical control that we think we have over our lives, and instead embrace a life of slower pace, less distractions, and more life. She writes of her own experience discarding some of the “rules” that we adopt, defining what’s normal, and how it instantly transformed her lifestyle into something much more meaningful. She paints a picture of a lifestyle that many of us long for, but fear is unattainable.

The truth is, anyone can slow down and live with less. Actually, it’s when you slow down that you actually start living. Learning to break the rules and remembering that life is for living rather than just existing is not easy at all. But when I look back on my life in twenty, thirty or forty years I don’t want to remember a life where I’ve overcommitted to countless things that I have no passion for. I want to remember spontaneous road trips, playing cards at a dinner table on display in an isolated corner of Sears Home, and walking in the rain without an umbrella.

I see Chasing Slow as a challenge, a call to live the fullest, most authentic version of my life. The key to this, or so it seems, is realizing that all I need is right in front of me, and everything else is white noise. If we choose only to fill our lives with the things that truly matter, we have so much more free space to enjoy those things. Even as I’m writing, in my brain I’m going, oh gosh this sounds hard… but in the long run I think it will be worth it.