On living in the present.

“For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is. Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”

Lev Grossman, The Magicians

Sometimes I wonder if all I’m ever meant to do is wait for the next big thing to come. Okay, I don’t wonder about it or wish it upon myself so much as fear that this might be the recurring pattern in my life, the groove in the wheel that I’ll forever be stuck on. All this web-surfing, this blog-reading is making my miserable ethics essay seem even more and more miserable. Of course these beautiful sunshiney days we’re having doesn’t help one bit either.

What's in here. Compared to...

Making New Year’s resolutions in March

2011 had no year-end realisations, no year-to-come resolutions, nothing deep and thoughtful. I was tired, fed up about thinking and feeling too much, definitely lazy. I’ve been avoiding writing since I got back home because I’ve been avoiding examining my life now that I’m finally in the here-and-now, with no laters and tomorrows on the horizon.

Maybe this is the healthier alternative, after all. Sure, some famous guy once said that an unexamined life is no life at all, but surely he wasn’t talking about girls and how the female psyche works. When one of your bigger problems is to overthink your way into melancholic introspection, then surely to stop thinking and dwelling on one’s feelings is a step in the right direction?

This year, there aren’t any specific resolutions. (Don’t start asking why this is a New Year entry in March. It’s because I’m finally back from my staycation and have to face the real life.) I only have a very general one – it’s to say YES to anything and everything that comes my way. Maybe it’s partly inspired by Jim Carrey’s film, maybe it’s partly due to this apparent quarter-life crisis I seem to be having. Or maybe it’s me finally getting sick and tired of getting in the own way of my happiness. I’m tired of complaining that I’m not getting the most of out life when a vast majority of hours are whiled away in front of my computer watching movies. I’m sick of being bored with Melbourne and unhappy in it when there are perfectly decent (and maybe) lovely things to do out there that I don’t know about when I spend the majority of nights staying inside.

The freedom of saying YES: this year, I promise to be my own Jim Carrey.

Like how a bird flies south for the winter

I wouldn’t mind being home right about now. I miss my bed and my car. I miss the sunlight that streams through the clear windows of the dining room at breakfast. I miss sitting with my coffee and a book. I miss my room and my privacy, the quiet that being alone affords. I get a lot of me-time here, don’t get me wrong, but being alone in a place where social connections abound, has an oppressive quality to it, somehow. As if I’m not spending my time as wisely as I should, holding hands, having deep conversation over even deeper cups of coffee. It’s strange how the brief moments of being alone in a place where I am constantly with someone or someones makes me feel lonelier than I am over there where being alone with your mind and being able to do things for yourself is necessitated by circumstance.

Starbucks satisfaction not quite the same as breakfast table (in my jammies with my book) happiness

I know I will miss this – the noise, the flurry, the unavoidable bumping into each other. But I miss my freedom too. Being able to sit quietly with just my feelings, being able to examine them as much as I wish (while often not the healthiest of past times), is a luxury I can ill-afford here. And yet, this is what I come home for every single year, like clockwork, like how birds fly south every winter.

The problem with me and signs

Can it be true when they say that some people aren’t meant to go on gap years, to go wild, to run with the wind and never look back?

My decision to bury my head in the sand lasted for roughly a month. Now I’m bound for university again, for even higher education. I’m not quite sold on the idea just yet, but at least it doesn’t repulse me and make me want to hang myself with the same intensity as it did before.

After months of soul-searching, deciding, moments of absolute liberation and crippling denial, I’ve decided to open my eyes and my ears, my heart to what the universe is telling me. When all signs point in the same direction, surely, that’s the way to go?

In homage to the timeless question: ‘WHAT IF?’

I am perfectly aware that in the course of our days, we constantly negotiate and re-negotiate our present in order to influence our future happiness. I know this – we make decisions then we change them. We make little choices throughout the day as to what colour undies to wear, what to have for lunch, which movie to watch. And then we make the bigger decisions that take significant time and effort, maybe a period of soul-searching. Or two. I know all that and yet it takes me by surprise when I am faced with big decisions that need to be made every other day, that I’m starting to laugh at the great cosmic joke that I feel like I’ve been thrown into.

Of commitment to the cause.

I’ve finally gone ahead and done it. I’ve committed – to a proper blog. I’ve never really understood blogs, not since my last one back when I was 16. I guess I never really understood the point of putting your thoughts up in cyberspace for all the world to see. I mean, what is an ordinary person meant to write about that’s so interesting that other people (who aren’t their friends) would care to read? Heck, I don’t even want to hear about my day, let alone strangers. Except maybe for the Kardashians’, I am loath to admit. But maybe that’s just me.

Now that I’ve decided to put myself on this (psychological) gap year, though, I feel like I finally have something to say. This whole trip that consists wholly of holidays and conversation upon conversation upon conversation with beloved girlfriends always falls back into the same things – talk of the future over endless cups of coffee.

I suppose it’s because we’re at that point in our lives where the dreams we were dreaming can now actually come into being. The seemingly endless years of being told “You can do what you want when you finish college” by our parents weren’t endless after all. They’ve ended, and we are here, now, and decisions have to be made. Weighty decisions that determine the course of our futures – decisions that we had been waiting to make for decades but now confound us to no end, decisions that we cannot afford NOT to make, at the risk of life just passing us by with absolutely no sense of direction. Yet still, some of us are more decided than others, some of us just a little bit more lost than the people supposedly in the same boat.

I am out of the boat, completely. I’ve decided to jump overboard and swim towards the beach where I’ve chosen to bury my head in the sand for a little while longer.

I know it’s not like me to do something like this. It’s not like a member of my family, or my (stereotypical) race, even. But it’s the lesser of two evils – to continue struggling against the jungle of choices and decisions that need to be weighed and considered, then taken, or to stay sane and healthy. Hopefully (somewhat naively) happy. Right now, at this point, I can only choose sanity. It’s all the answer I can muster at the moment, and the world will just have to content itself with, “I don’t know…yet.” as the best answer I can give right now.

There’s this concept in Filipino called pagwawala, from the verb magwala which means to run amok. It’s something akin to the concept of the show Girls Gone Wild, except possibly with less boob exposure. When I told my mother I had decided magwala this year, she looked at me with a raised eyebrow that pulsed suspicion and scepticism and asked me, “You’re not going to get pregnant ‘by accident’, are you?” No I am not. I explained that when I say pagwawala I simply mean that I’m going to take this year to figure out what I want to do with my life at leisure, steeling my heart against expectationspressuresandstress and just following my heart, which at the moment yearns excitement and the experience of youth (but more on that later). To which she replied, “Oh. So a gap year?” Ah! That sounds much more promising than running amok.

And so, I am on a gap year. The concept of a gap year is something I learned in Australia. It’s taking a year off between high school and uni to do whatever it is young people do – whether it’s spending the year on the couch, veging out or couch surfing across Europe.

While being optimistic, let’s be realistic though. For a person like me, a gap year doesn’t mean unemployment and a solid year of Robinson Crusoe-like adventures. What it means (most probably) is getting a job (instead of a career) to save up enough money to see a bit of a world before answering the (now dreadful) question – “What do you want plan to do with your life?”

Before taking on blogging again, I was given the advice that the best blogs are the ones with focus. And so, I’ve decided this one to chronicle my (psychological) gap year – (hopefully) my journey from being lost to finding myself, from being a confused little girl to a decided young woman, from having absolutely no answers to finding the best one from the set of alternatives before me.

So. Here’s to blogging, here’s to youth and life. Here’s to asking the questions and trying to find the answers.

Cheers,

Trish