Thought of the day

So I have the blog posts (Alana does Paris part I and Alana does Paris part II) written, but I won't post them till later because my computer is the one with the pics on it, not the computer here at work, and I don't want to post one without the other! But in the mean time...

So this morning I had a long conversation with Audrey (one of the other interns here at the IMA who went to college in the states) about... post graduation stuff. What am I going to do, where am I going to go etc... and our conversation slipped into the topic of the GRE, how to study for it and the best strategies etc. And then a strange feeling came over me, one I haven't felt in a long time... It is a strange mix of anxiety, pressure and motivation, and the last time I felt it was in high school, when I was worrying about getting into the right school, and doing what I was SUPPOSED to do (whatever the hell that might mean!) Thoughts started running through my head, I need to study I need to do this I need to do that... then fear took a hold, and my fight or flight insticts kicked in. And since I am a pacifist it was flight and my thoughts were only to become a hippie and live in the woods for the rest of my life... and then I took a step back, and realized that I have made a lot of effort in the past three years not be "a person like that" anymore. Not to be freaking out about doing the right thing and going the right place and being who the world or whatever says I need to be. It took a lot to try to get over that mindset (and I still struggle with it sometimes, and I still stress out way to much I know) and I don't want to slip back into it. Whatever I do, wherever I go, it will be where I want to go because I want to go there, not because it is what I am SUPPOSED to do. I get to pick, not everyone else, and that is a liberating thought.

So I decided that I will try to think about that kind of stuff this summer, and not worry about it now, and I have to keep the future and what it may or may not hold in perspective, relative to the here and now. Then at lunch I was reading some Donald Miller, and this little excerpt made me feel better about everything, and I hope not to have any "high school me" relapses again.

"And maybe when a person doesn’t buy the lies anymore, when a human stops long enough to realize the stuff people say to get us to part with our money often isn’t true, we can finally see the sunrise, smell the wetness in a Gulf breeze, stand in awe at a downpour no less magnificent than a twenty-thousand foot waterfall, ten square miles wide, wonder at the physics of a duck paddling itself across the surface of a pond, enjoy the reflection of the sun on the face of the moon; and know; This is what I was made to do. This is who I was made to be, that life is being given to me as a gift, that light is a metaphor, and God is doing these things to dazzle us."

Donald Miller, in Through Painted Deserts