Your life is not a waiting room.

As I've started to get a little life under my belt, I've noticed myself wondering about time and intention and a lot about this foggy future concept. And with that has come a few realizations about what it means to be alive. What we're to do this here and now business, while our hearts quietly, loyally, pump away, non-stop, day after day - breathing life into both the loud and quiet moments.  

I'm futuristic. We know this - if you read my posts or know me at all, we know this fact to be incredibly true. I not only want to know what's going to happen today, but also what I'll wear tomorrow, and what I'm going to eat this week, where I'm going next month, and what the big plan is for next year. I want to know if I'm moving cross country or if I'll be nesting elsewhere. I want to know if I live out my days in Ohio or on a lovely beach. I want to know on our first date if you're going to be the one to love me forever. So I rush and I worry and I spend less time taking in the lights around me and instead piddle away my time on trying to sort out the murkiness of all that is to come. I don't live in the here and now very often, but every time I do I'm reminded why it's the most magnificent of experiences. I'm the kind of gal that takes the most precious of moments for granted.

But I don't want to live this way forever. It's not fun. It's not peaceful. It's got it positives certainly - I'm almost always prepared. I don't often forget things. I'm the girl that always brings the coat just in case she might be cold. But as the people who love me most remind me, every day, the mistakes are what make you. The moments in time where you decided, in an instant, to just live your life and be all in, to jump into the darkness and enjoy the windfall along with the inevitable trips,scrapes, and bruises and even more than that, the stories that go along with it. Because no matter what you do, life will keep coming and it's got no intention of telling you what's around the bend. It's full of pleasant surprises and celebrations - clinking glasses and champagne toasts. There will be fullness and happiness and love. But there will also be loss and tragedy and sadness and heartbreak and funerals.

We don't get to live designer lives. There is no picking and choosing what happens to you from the grand catalog of potential life experiences. And instead of fighting again the current that will never relent, we should settle in the flow and ride the waves. And as we do, we should take a moment to look around and soak it in. Because right now, I think life is pretty good. 

We spend so much of our precious time with headphones in our ears and our faces in front of screens. We watch documentaries about nature but never hike the trail down the street. We watch films about love and romance and all the most lovely of things, but we choose to separate ourselves from others for the fear of being known or vulnerable enough to expose our imperfections. We wait for life to happen to us instead of happening to life. 

So let me break it down for you. Your life is not a waiting room. Your hopes and dreams are real and meaningful, but if you don't take the chance to get your nose out of that screen and your head out of the clouds, the best things in life are going to pass you right by. Because now is good. And now is here. And the people and places and love and beauty and time you've got in this moment might not last forever.

I propose a challenge for you and for me. To be present. To be here. To put down the iCal and the gCal and agenda book. To stop begging to know what's next or to have it all figured out. Your story will unravel however it chooses, and I truly believe that whatever is meant for you, will happen. That your plan and purpose will expose itself no matter how much you plan for something (or someone) else. 

I challenge you to this: open your heart to this moment. To holding a hand, to a spontaneous kiss. To laughter in coffee shops and last minute meals. To letting go of the little bag you tote around full of your fears and the hurt you've refused to release into the universe. To fall in love and just let it happen instead of questioning every word, step, motive, stripping away the joy of the whole experience. To embrace the chaos of 7 billion lives, as wonderful and mysterious as yours, orbiting one another. To invest in those who invest in you. 

For today, this coming season, and the rest of your life, I wish for you these things:

I pray that your life is filled with magic and madness and that some of your dreams really do come true.

I hope that you read wonderful books and kiss someone who thinks you're absolutely mad but absolutely fabulous.

I hope that you create something that lives on - whatever it may be - for others to admire and appreciate and for you to know you've left an imprint on the face of this incomprehensibly large but unimaginably tiny blue planet.

I wish you happiness and singing and dancing and joy and peace and patience and kindness and the warmest of sunshine on your face.

I send you hope. For the future, whatever it may hold, and that you choose to let it come as it will, allowing the universe to surprise you along the way.

This life isn't going to be perfect; it was never meant to be. I will drop this truth on you straight: You will never "arrive". That place where you're confidently doing all the right things at all the right times with all the right people does not exist. But this place, doing these things, with these people - it's pretty enchanting if you let it be.