Joy

This is a rant.

A rant about joy, actually.

I strongly believe in making choices. About waking up and choosing how you will live your day. Grabbing it by the horns, per say.

To take a stand for something epic, and to live hard. On occasions, harder than you feel comfortable with.

I want to rid the word 'stress' from my vocabulary. It's a harsh, overused word. And it's a lie. 

I choose for it to be a lie.

I want to look at the word 'balance' and define it for myself, in my own terms. That's a hard one.

You see, I don't know what my balance is, in the midst of this passion and joy that I speak of, and the important areas in my life that I manage.

My health is incredibly important, but to what degree? Is a late night spent writing, dreaming, catching up with friends that results in 5 hours of sleep, is that reckless to my health?

I'm not sure.

I should be saving more money. In fact there are a lot of things I should be doing as a 24 year old, so says the world, that I'm currently not.

I'm really, really not sure that I care. 

Hold on, wait. I do care. But I'm not sure how much.

Because there's this desperate, daily struggle that I have. A manic, passionate fight for joy. It's incredibly important to me, joy is. And it so easily gets swallowed in worry, in routine, and in being too FREAKING careful.

Yet it lives in this "epic-ness" that I so often speak of.

It's been almost 10 months. 10 months since transplanting my life to this East Coast world, a whole new world as Aladdin would sing it.

And every month has gotten easier, relationships have grown stronger, places have become more familiar.

I've become comfortable. Perhaps too comfortable.

Because I haven't found my niche, whatever that means. It hasn't clicked yet.

I recently wrote a letter to Andrew, as there are just times where I prefer to write instead of talk. The part I want to share is this:

"I love and miss Colorado for so many different reasons, but I recently realized that the biggest reason is that it FORCES me to live in awe of God. Every day that I’m there I wake up and see the mountains, see the beautiful city that I love so much… that I genuinely just want to fall to my knees."

I share that simply to share a passion. I haven't forgotten that feeling, I never will. 

So I keep searching for that awe out here, in Maryland. Because with the awe comes the passion, the joy, the balance.

I know it's somewhere. It's hiding in the cracks of 60 degree December days like today, when I open my sunroof and sing Taylor Swift at the top of my lungs, using my iPhone as a fake microphone.

It's there.