A Flaw In The Plan

The last few years rose and converged into a long-awaited realization yesterday. It's been growing and trying to speak to me in the stillness, but I have trouble listening. I blame iTunes.

I realized that everything must change. Simple enough, yet, it spirals deeper.

As I stood in line at the Financial Aid office yesterday and watched my semester plans be slashed by red tape and tax forms, my mind went dark and melancholic. Driving back to my apartment I grudgingly got ready for work, to earn my pay making lattes and facilitating conversations. I ate a quick meal of lemon meringue pie to feel better. It helped slightly.

To give you insight into my work rituals, it is my custom is to ride my bike along the river and through downtown because it reminds me of riding along the Loire and France a few years ago. I leave 45 minutes early to arrive at least a half hour early; to sit, to read, and to wonder. but today I drove, because I didn't have the strength to ride. So I took the car for the first time in a month or so.

Usually I like to use this extra time to write in a journal mostly. Anything, once a day, needs to be written in there. I couldn't think of anything to write, nothing felt right, why bother with it.

Why bother with any of it? I liked this thought. So I pursued it further.

I knew I wasn't the happiest here, I felt restless and wasn't content with myself and everything rotating around it. So why bother with it? If I don't like it, I'll change it. I have the power to change my circumstances. Rotate the camera to see everything I've been missing. And so, the plan to leave was conceived.

Northern Indiana, I love you, but we must bid our separate ways. It's time to start anew. It's been coming for awhile. You've served your time, but I'll be gone by my twenty-second birthday.

And so the flaw in the plan becomes the cornerstone, the inception of long-desired dreams. For too long have I lived in dreams and the stories in my head. Fantasies of life as how I want them. I have never been my dreams, I have only ever been the reluctant reality of the mundane mediocrity, the modern man.

But I saw that I am not defined by my dreams, it is by the works of my hand will I bring forth the poetry and the bursting life and colors. And so I must risk my comfort, and put away my childish neurotic tendencies, paranoia, and risks of rejection to create the story of my life.

Rilke wrote it best. "All of the soarings of my mind begin in my blood."

With Ardor & Love, Away We Go.