Have Cheap Luggage, Will Travel

My life is making me want to give up lately. I think that when you are young that you never think that 30 is a real thing. Maybe in my mind 30 was like winning the lottery. It only happened to people on TV but would never happen to me. Turns out I was wrong and it looks like 30 will come if I like it or not.

Even thought I never thought becoming a quasi-adult would never happen to me, I - true to little girl without a Daddy format – imagined quasi-adulthood as a married woman. The question for me now is what if that doesn’t happen, what do I think of myself?

To tell you the truth, I really have no idea. What bucket do I fit in? Where do I belong? I always had this idea of how life was going to go and it is not going according to plan.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not sobbing in my pillow every night. I’m just confused. Do I wait for the circumstances in my life to create who I will be when I grow up or do I charge ahead to make my own circumstances?

I have this vision of myself straddling several fences right now.

I have one foot in my church world which I love but I don’t want to get too far from where I came from because I am afraid of loosing the rawness of the real decision I have made to follow Christ.

I have one foot in my work world which I also love but I don’t want to put both feet in because I lived too many years letting my life revolve around work and know what a dead end/ revolving door/ black whole life you can create for yourself when you are a workaholic.

I have one foot in friends’ worlds which I need but they have their own lives, so I am always fighting for their time with boyfriends, work or anything. Except for my friends Bryan and Jen who are always there for me no matter what.

So as I watch myself tread water in all these worlds, I wonder what it will take to push me over the fence and at the same time get completely sick of doing nothing.

At my job, we have been working on a conference for teen girls and the funny thing is, those girls are asking the same questions and they are 15. I guess this wondering never changes but one thing you can be sure of is that I will not tread water for long.

I met a girl today that said she wanted to teach film/photography in college because the students are always sad and she gets to love on them. Not that she loves teaching so much but that she loves broken people.

I have always thought that same thing but I just thought it was because I was a little messed up myself. Which has a lot to do with it but after some deep introspection over Starbucks, I really think I like broken sad people because to be broken and sad means that you actually have to care about something - to have passion. I bet that film students are all like that because it makes them better at their craft. Who wants to watch a movie that the director felt okay about? Maybe summer blockbusters fall in that category but I digress.

Passion and sadness. I bet that most people would not put the two together but for me being passionate means that you feel deeply about things and you are not afraid of that feeling whatever it is. People often hide their sadness because we humans look on sadness with pity. Why? Sadness to me seems like a great opportunity.

Can you ever really be known by people if they only know the happy sunshiny parts of you? More importantly, can you ever really know yourself if you are never challenged by the circumstances in your life?

To embrace sadness and be comfortable with it is to wear your insides on the outside. All gooshy and getting all over everybody. Kinda uncomfortable in a vulnerable way. I have some friends that are insides-on-the-outside people. They spend a lot of time in their house away from others because too many people have hurt their gooshy outsides – mostly Christians actually which confuses me because for some reason they want to be friends with me.

But you know - they know who they are. They wonder about careers and kids and all the stuff that the rest of us wonder about, but they do not wonder about WHO they are. Makes me jealous. I guess the lesson here for me is to be comfortable with my sadness around others and to be comfortable with my friend’s sadness without trying to fix it because it is beautiful.

I sometimes forget how small my existence is in the scheme of things and am usually rudely jerked out of my inwardly focused trance with a blog in mind.

Vancouver is a beautiful place. When I first arrived, I walked along the harbor observing my surroundings. A flock of geese grazed to my left and in the harbor to my right, people were kayaking and tossing balls in the water for their dogs to chase. A handful of sparrows jetted in front of me and all around me were groups of people playing with their kids, grilling out and chatting over local wines. The area was full of people enjoying each other but it was 5 PM which means that they all had to get off work early to be here by now. My first glimpse what kinds of ideas frame this place.

The skyline is littered with tall condos and all of these buildings far out way the office buildings. So, the question is, were do all these people work? I imagine that you can find them at Starbucks, restaurants, manning gas stations as well as in the office buildings. While I was there, only one young person served me my coffee or brought me my breakfast. I guess they think that your job doesn’t define you and that careers aren’t the main focus. Weirdos.

The city is nice but it isn’t new. Most of my meetings were in buildings that would be considered run down in Dallas. In fact, my first meeting was with the Canadian Country Station of the Year for the last three years and when I walked into the lobby, I thought I went in the wrong building. They obviously built the building in the 70’s, moved in and have never renovated. There is nothing really wrong with it. It just smelled musty and everything is orange and peeling. Almost all of the buildings are like that.

I watched a man dig through the trash behind my hotel, but he wasn’t looking for food. He was foraging through everything that we threw away and organizing it into piles. Glass bottles here, cans there. He was making a living off what we threw away. While he was digging, a ton of other trash fell out of the dumpster on the ground. When he was done, he cleaned all of the extra trash up and made sure that it looked like it did before he got there.

Life is just different there. White people are the minority. Homeless people are considerate of their surroundings. People care more about what they are doing after work than work itself.

At the end of my trip after I had observed all of this, I felt really weird. Like I had stumbled past the lamp post into some fantasy world that didn’t really exist. Was I the weirdo? Were my ideas of life shallow? Was this the real world or was the world I came from real?

As I considered staying in this place and abandoning everything that I previously knew to be true, I settled into my seat on the plane flying direct back to Dallas. And then I was jetted back to “reality” by conversations flowing around me.

“Your shoes are so cute, where did you get them……I am going to e-mail George and let him know that I saw his name in the paper…….I don’t give a –bleep- if we missed the numbers, they are just going to have to deal with it.”

Ah, Dallas and real life. The question now is, do I tell my klan about the world I saw beyond the lamp post? Will they call me a hippie and roll their eyes? Will they send me back there? But more importantly, will I be different? I hope so.