Take a Deep Breath

Last summer I visited London.  It was my first time out of the United States (I'm not counting the Canadian side of Niagara Falls).  It's funny, before going I wasn't so much excited about going to London.  Of course I knew I would be seeing great art, and of course I was excited about that, but it wasn't London that was the big draw for me, it was the idea of traveling, of being someplace completely new, getting away.  I ended up falling completely in love with London, and now desperately want to go back, because it's London.  

It's strange to think about how much my world has changed in the past year.  I've been to 4 different countries, and experienced things that I can't experience in America.  The world is smaller to me, in the sense that I can see things in other parts of the world.  Of course there is still a vastness to it, but I can visual things now, they are no longer image-less ideas and notions in my mind.  Of course there are places that I haven't been that I cannot fathom, but I can at least fathom perhaps being there someday.  But I have memories of places now, places beyond my home.  

The more that I see, the more that I've experienced, the more widened things in my mind become.  The past year has made me realize how little I actually know, if I even "know" anything at all.  "Everything we think we know is absolutely unknowable (and/or just plain incorrect)."  said Martha Rosler.  How true that is.  When I was in high school I knew so much about life; who I was, what I wanted, what I could/couldn't do, how things worked in the world.  Today, I don't know what I want, or how the world works.  I don't know what I can and cannot do, and I don't know who I am (though I am quite comfortable these days with simply "being").   In some ways its so exciting, so liberating.  In other ways, its terrifying.  As I head into the summer before my senior year of college, and beginning to seriously think about the future, it is overwhelming and scary.  I don't know what I want, and I don't know what's going to happen to me, or what is a good step to make.  But it's also exciting.  I have all of these ideas, dreams and desires.  I want to travel, I want to paint, I want to do yoga, I want to play with little kids...and I have the rest of my life to do all these things.  Sometimes I just have to take a breath and remind myself of that fact.