Metaphors

One of my absolute favorite things to do in the morning is to take the time to sit down with a hot cup of coffee, and a blank page - or blank computer screen. The potential to write literally anything I want; what's bothering me, what I'm thankful for, what's been nagging at the back of my mind, is kind of like a small sigh of relief.

When I sat down this morning I didn't know where my fingers were going to take me.  I've got a lot going on in this head right now, it's been a week to say the least.  But I knew that if I just started writing, it would go somewhere, and I would feel better.

You should see the way I go about writing drafts, it's semi-manic.  The initial flow isn't a flow at all, paragraphs jump all over the place with thoughts I don't want to lose, and words repeat themselves. Once I'm convinced it's all there, I start picking through, deleting, rearranging and rewording.  I stop, pace around.  I take my wedding ring on and off, sometimes get aggravated by my glasses and put my contacts in.  I read it a few times outloud.

If life was like writing, it might be a little easier.  "Wait hold on, I don't like the way I just answered that question, it actually might be offensive, let me delete that line."  Not that simple.  Once the words are said, once the actions are done, there's no editing in life.  Sure there are do-overs, but that doesn't delete the memory of the first time.

And while life isn't like writing, it also is... because of the wild potential. To get a little metaphorical, we are writing our lives, right?  We are consciously choosing how to spend every waking minute, we are selecting what we do with our time.  As I'm sitting here, pausing and looking at the rest of my life as one giant blank page, it somewhat intimidates me.  Sure, I've got 28 years of pages full behind me - soon to be 29 - and every single page is bursting with content, emotion.  But not to be morbid... I mean who really knows how many blank pages I have ahead of me to fill.  None of us do.

I just think too often we get caught in the crazy routine of life, the repetitiveness of the Monday-Friday... and we fall into the "life is a grind" or "my day is a checklist" mindset instead of "life is a crazy beautiful novel, that each of us are writing, side by side."

Alright, I'll hop off the metaphor train now.  Just like blankness, I take great joy in newness.  New years, new months, heck even new weeks. I turn 29 in roughly three weeks, and I'm choosing to use that as a benchmark. There's been a lot of back and forth lately in figuring out what I want, who I want to be, what I'm striving for, what I'm pursuing during our time here in Israel.  Because it's a limited amount of time, but it offers massive potential. And while there have been small victories the first five months; baby steps have been made, certain things have been figured out... I'm not really looking for a handful of small victories during year 29.  I'm looking for bigger ones.

Kait you're back on the metaphor train with this victory talk, what do you even mean?

I don't know. I guess I have three weeks to figure it out.

Cheers - 

Kait