Tuesday, October 13, 2015

The more you do, the less you know.

It's been awhile, friends. I've been thinking about a lot of things lately. And I'm realizing that the more I move through life and experience things, the less I feel like I know.

Can you relate just off of that one sentence?

I know it sounds contradictory. It's not to say that I haven't learned and gained wisdom from my experiences, but these experiences have taught me that you never know what you think you know. I've been trying over the past 8 months to change my thinking and how I live my life. Big shifts have led to new philosophies, new people, and new experiences that I am so grateful for. I have been untethered, but in an exciting way. Untethered but rooted in parts of myself I hadn't known...and it's been both painful and rewarding.

A big part of this has been letting go of everything I think I know about things. Relationships, friendships, work. It's almost as if up to this point I had been working with formulas in my mind of how things should be made up in order to equal what I needed.

Dating relationships, for example. I thought I knew what it involved for the most part...even especially so watching so many friends in their relationships and with my previous dating experiences. Not to say that I understood it, but that I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted and how I was going to act in one. Well, wrong. Dating has shown me that everything I ever constructed about what this all would feel like was essentially flawed by the fact that no matter how I'm acting, the person I'm with is not going to fit into my formula. Everyone is different. Thank God, really. But it has been one of those tough yet rewarding experiences that is continually shaping me.

Friendships. Here, I am learning the ebb and flow of friends in my life. I was off of social media for the past 10 months, and got back on last week. What I found was that people's lives had just kept going (weird, right?), and there was much to catch up on. But at the same time I was grateful for that time away because although I am interested in the updates of those people's lives, I knew that I had stayed up to date on the lives of those closest to me without social media while still maintaining a sense of space in my own life. This is a season of appreciating those friends, and focusing on fostering those friendships.

Work. My job has surprised me by morphing into what I need right now. I've shifted my thinking from the future to right now, and I think that's made all the difference. I'm trying new things, excelling, and overall enjoying the relationships and knowledge I've gained there.

The pieces of our lives sit so delicately balanced from day to day, and sometimes it doesn't take much to throw it all into turmoil. It is because of this that I am trying to be more present than ever before, and not live in fear of the future but in awareness of the present. When my mind is racing at a thousand miles an hour, a new, calmer voice responds...let it go. Whatever will be, will be. For me remaining in this awareness takes a lot of laughter, deep breaths, yoga, good company, some occasional tears, and a good amount of wine and/or good beer. It's not easy, but it's been worth it so far.