Slowly open.

I didn't know what I was going to get into tonight, because I'm basically in a country where I still know next to no one and nothing. I've gone out the past two nights, but tonight I decided to stay put. My roommate was generous enough to give me permission to use her colored pencils, so I bought a sketchbook today at the store. I've spent the evening loafing, listening to classical music, and drawing. (This will have a point by the end, I promise.)

First, I was thinking about autumn at home, the leaves changing colors, the way the sky always looks more deeply blue in October. I googled images of West Virginia in autumn, and I decided to draw that. I started just by working at the blue of the sky. I was ready to start working on trees and leaves when I looked down and saw a picture of a tulip on my journal. All of a sudden I didn't want to draw mountains and trees anymore. I wanted to draw a tulip. So I used the same background I was using; it made a perfect sky, and went on to draw a tulip. I started out working on one thing, changed directions, wound up doing something else, but... no time was wasted.

It's a strange notion to me that if we start working at one thing and change directions, change our minds, that the time was wasted. Perhaps it's presumptuous of someone in her 20's to say so, but I think that's part of the reason mid-life crises are such a big deal. You have a person in their 40s, 50s, and all of a sudden, what they've been doing the last 20 or 30 years isn't what they want to do anymore. We say they just never knew who they were, never figured out what they wanted. But who says growth has to stop, that at a certain age, a certain point in our lives we have to decide what we want to do and continue down that path unhesitatingly until we retire? That doesn't compute to me. I think with all the infinite possibilities of the human mind it's only natural to want to continue probing our potential. I mean, who doesn't know someone who's changed careers half way through their lives? It doesn't mean that what they did before doesn't matter anymore. Maybe they were just painting coloring in their sky before and suddenly realized they wanted to fill it with something else. Or maybe they want a whole new sky, and why not?

I suppose I lean toward this type of thinking because I've been all over the place myself. I'm studying Spanish now. I'm sitting in my apartment in Spain, waiting for classes to start on Monday. But I still believe everything leading up to this point, even and perhaps especially the stuff that seems like it had nothing to do with me coming here, mattered. We have seasons. The rest of winter is important to the growth of spring and summer.

Idk, I'm everywhere with this tonight. But even though I don't have a conclusion, I enjoyed sitting here and thinking. Maybe the fact that I did will yield a future result, maybe not. Sometimes there aren't any conclusions, and it's enough to just exist and be part of a mystery, not forcing it to unfold too quickly.