I remember the first few months after I graduated college as one of the most difficult transitions I've experienced. For the first time in my recallable life, I was no longer a student, no longer measured my life in semesters and breaks, no longer had any clear goal or purpose.

My life felt like it was on pause, like I was in a holding pattern, biding my time until for the "next big thing" happened. After expressing this to a friend (the beauty of a good community), she shared a passage by author Shuana Niequist from her book Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life.

As she was reading, I felt like my own thoughts were being spoken from another's mouth.

Fast forward a few years and her words still resonate. I wanted to share them with you, both so you can get a better understanding of where I am writing from, and also in the hopes that you may be encouraged to actually live in each day and not pass through them to the next big adventure.

“I have always, essentially, been waiting. Waiting to become something else, waiting to be that person I always thought I was on the verge of becoming, waiting for that life I thought I would have. In my head, I was always one step away. In high school, I was biding my time until I could become the college version of myself, the one my mind could see so clearly. In college, the post-college “adult” person was always looming in front of me, smarter, stronger, more organized. Then the married person, then the person I’d become when we have kids. For twenty years, literally, I have waited to become the thin version of myself, because that’s when life will really begin.

And through all that waiting, here I am. My life is passing, day by day, and I am waiting for it to start. I am waiting for that time, that person, that event when my life will finally begin.
I love movies about “The Big Moment” – the game or the performance or the wedding day or the record deal, the stories that split time with that key event, and everything is reframed, before it and after it, because it has changed everything. I have always wanted this movie-worthy event, something that will change everything and grab me out of this waiting game into the whirlwind in front of me. I cry and cry at these movies, because I am still waiting for my own big moment. I had visions of life as an adventure, a thing to be celebrated and experienced, but all I was doing was going to work and coming home, and that wasn’t what it looked like in the movies.

John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” For me, life is what was happening while I was busy waiting for my big moment. I was ready for it and believed that the rest of my life would fade into the background, and that my big moment would carry me through life like a lifeboat.

The Big Moment, unfortunately, is an urban myth. Some people have them, in a sense, when they win the Heisman or become the next American Idol. But even that football player or that singer is living a life made up of more than that one moment. Life is a collection of a million, billion moments, tiny little moments and choices, like a handful of luminous, glowing pearl. It takes so much time, and so much work, and those beads and moments are so small, and so much less fabulous and dramatic than the movies.

But this is what I’m finding, in glimpses and flashes: this is it. This is it, in the best possible way. That thing I’m waiting for, that adventure, that move-score-worthy experience unfolding gracefully. This is it. Normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, in our houses and apartments, in our beds and at our dinner tables, in our dreams and prayers and fights and secrets – this pedestrian life is the most precious thing any of use will ever experience.” 

-Shuana Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life.

Sorry for the prolonged silence! 

Having a blog has shown me how bad I really am at time management. 

This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for days now but it kept getting put off. 

Before we get too far into August for a July recap, though, I want to share some pictures from a vacation I took earlier last month. 

I had a few days off work for the 4th so I took the opportunity to visit a dear friend from college who now lives in  Washington, D.C.. 

I then had a few days of business meetings in New York and finished the whole adventure with a wonderful weekend in Yosemite visiting another friend.

It was my first time on the East Coast so needless to say I was very excited! 

Did you know that there is a difference between capitol (the building itself) and capital (the city that is the center of government? Cue confusion for the entire trip.

Since it was my first time in D.C., we celebrated the 4th like good tourists. We watched the rehearsal of the Capitol Concert the night before, went to a reading of the Declaration of Independence in front of the National Archives and baked in the sun while watching the National Independence Day Parade.

The next day we also enjoyed a hike in Maryland. The East Coast is gorgeous!

After a few wonderful days, I took the train up the New York City for a few days of business meetings. I fell in love with rail travel after a trip I took to England a few years ago and this train ride was no exception. 

My first time in the Big Apple. New York has such an amazing food scene I could spent my entire time eating my way around the city. One of my favorite finds was The Laughing Man, a coffee shop with a community development goals founded by Hugh Jackman. I was a repeat customer of their amazing Flat White and gluten-free biscotti.

On my last full day in the city, I took the subway from where I was staying in Tribeca up to Central Park. The park is beautiful and huge!

After New York, I finished my vacation with a few days visiting another friend in Yosemite. 

Good morning lovelies!

According to my blogger stats, 42 people viewed my post yesterday. So I am currently throwing myself a mini party. It is exciting to know that more than just my sister (shout-out to Cam, my most dedicated reader) has read this blog. Wahoo!

As I was driving to work this morning - it seems that my commute is my best time of inspiration - I had the idea to try and revitalize my mid-week. Usually Mondays or Fridays are when I try to make changes or start something new (i.e. "no refined sugar for this week" or "I will practice my French for 15 minutes a day") and the middle of the week gets lost in the excuse that I'm just trying to make it to the weekend.

But that isn't living each day, especially when that day happens to be in the middle of the week. So I decided to start something called "Wednesday Resolution" as a way to give some life back to my week. On Wednesdays, I will be making a resolution that helps me live in the present day or brings richness to the daily.

Soooo drumroll please . . .

Wednesday Resolution #1: I will stop wasting money on bad espresso

Because it really isn't worth it. And because it really is worth getting up early enough to stop by a good coffee shop on my way to work *cough* not Starbucks *cough*. Or figuring out how to brew some myself at work (pending venture for a later post).

I will be using the hashtag #WednesdayResolution to chronicle my journey on social media if you'd like to follow along or join in.

Don't be fooled by the ordinary cup. This was an amazing latte.

Here's to combating mid-week slump and living fully in each day! Happy Wednesday everyone!

Blogger's note: The above photo was taken on location in my office. It almost never looks that clean though, I moved everything just for the shot. Maybe one day I'll give a photo tour of my office. But since it is usually a mess, that will probably never happen.

. . . And this is only my third post.

Let me be straight . . . blogging is hard! Way harder than I expected.

Never did I anticipate I would be thinking so much about my day, about my surroundings, about my activities. I found myself wondering "how will this look on my blog?" or "how can I can phrase this in a witty way?"

Truth be told, my life really isn't all that blog-worthy. Things never look on my blog like they do in my head (a key reason my stint as a wedding photographer was so short-lived).

And I'm really not all that witty. I have my rare moments of genius and I savor those for days after but I mostly rely on a self-deprecating sense of humor to get me by.

But that wasn't why I started to blog in the first place. Not to make my life look more flashy or perfect than it actually is. At it's heart, this blog was meant to be a sort of online journal, a form of blogtherapy, a public accountability that forces me to intentionally find the good and beautiful in each day.

Honestly, it is really difficult for me to live in the present. One of the things that most surprised me after graduating college was how daily life is. I was ready to go one adventure after another and change the world all the while. Instead I found myself sitting in front of a computer for 30+ hours a week, doing very little of either.

Fast forward a couple years and not much has changed. Life is still very daily. But I've discovered, often just in small glimpses, that it is in the daily that life is really lived.

That's why reason the tagline for my blog is "practicing the art of daily living." Because I think it really is both an art and a discipline to live in each day that we've been given. Yes, I do have dreams for my future (more about those later) but I don't want my dreaming to take away the day that I am currently living.

When I pulled out of my driveway on my way to work this morning, I had the phrase "vulnerability begets vulnerability" running through my head. My hope is this: that this blog will be a place where I can become vulnerable with my life and all its dailiness. Not something that constrains my life, but something that enriches it. And something that is an encouragement to those who read it, that together we can make it through this journey called life, one day at a time.

Oh Mondays.

It's the same every week. I drink bad coffee, tackle an inbox full unread emails and lament the fact that I didn't do enough laundry over the weekend.

But sometimes I also go on evening hikes with wonderful friends. And am reminded that I do live in a place of beauty.

Or I celebrate the birth of my future nephew-in-law, AKA the future king of England. 

It will all work out, my sister and brother-in-law just need to have a daughter within the next five or so years and I'll be well on my way to being a royal auntie. 

Not bad for a Monday ;)

I had one of those nights ... when my perfect little plan gets set a bit askew.

I'm talking long-term, life plans. The kind that I hold onto the tightest and ironically also the kind that are the most out of my control. I can be irrational like that. 

I'd recently mapped out a financial plan for paying off my student loans (which was looong overdue! Seriously kids, start planning as soon as you graduate!) and then realized tonight that I'd way miscalculated the interest on one of my loans. Meaning I owe more than I'd thought and now my plans have to change.

Really not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things (but try telling that to myself when I'm in the middle of an irrational fit - cue two-year-old moment).

Yes, I have student loans. But I also have a college degree and a good job that enables me to pay them off (it's been officially decided that I experience the most "first world problems" in my family and here is a perfect example of that). 

In all honesty, though, this makes me recognize how much security I put in being "free" with my loans as the chains that are tying my down.

When I was younger, my mom used to quote Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, "The last of one's freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given circumstance."

So even if I can't make my student loans disappear overnight, I can choose to not be consumed with paying them back ASAP. There is so much more to life than that. 

I may get caught up in my plans and dreams for my future, but I am trying to learn to see the good and beautiful in the dailiness of life. Because that is where life is really lived. 

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