I need something more lighthearted today.
Heavy work and thinking weekend. Lots of pondering about what to do next in a certain situation, worrying about something going on in my family this week, and just general (normal-for-me) anxiety.

So, something a bit lighter.

I have officially turned into my mother. The tipping point was yesterday, when I found myself rinsing out Ziploc bags to reuse. I have a goal to not buy them anymore – to change to reusable ones. But the issue is that I still wash and reuse them all the time. And I said I would never do that! mostly because my mother did. And I thought it was absurd and ridiculous. Now, of course, I realize that she was absolutely doing the right thing, if she wasn’t going to (or wasn’t able to) switch to reusables (they didn’t exist when she started doing this…)

I put water in the dish detergent to get every last bit out of the bottle.

I squeeze the toothpaste tube from the bottom up.

I haven’t started telling the same stories over and over (and over) again, but I anticipate that will start soon.

I want to chop off all my hair, a move she made when she was just a bit younger than me.

We like the same books.

We like the same food.

We both laugh at my father and his overreaction to things like a man-cold.

If you saw us together, you’d know we’re related

And yet, I differ so much from her in other ways – important (to me) ways.

Politically, spiritually, socially. She’s an extrovert with a loud voice who likes to dominate conversation and doesn’t know what to do with a weekend without plans.

I am… not an extrovert with a loud voice, and there is nothing I like more than a quiet weekend without plans.

I shop at thrift shops, nearly exclusively. She shops at Talbots.

She wears makeup to go to the gym sometimes, and always, always, wears jewelry.

Um, yeah. My 1-minute makeup “routine” is the essence of minimalism.

And yet. There are still these hints of her in my actions, in what I do unconsciously on a daily basis.

It’s reassuring and comforting, in a way, to know that some of what I do is not new to me, but instead rooted in years of observation and absorbing her way of doing things, even if I once ridiculed it. I haven’t changed everything about who I was before, where I came from. I’ve changed a lot, yes, but there are still vestiges of who I was that persist.

And I’m okay with that.

This is totally not life-related, but in a reading for one of my classes that I teach, the phrase “horizons of expectations” appears. And I read it, and was completely taken aback.

It made me think… do I have horizons for my expectations? Horizons are boundaries, limits… but I suppose they could also be seen as a line of infinite possibilities. Horizons are what we see when we gaze out from where we are now. What happens if we move towards those horizons, and new ones open up? The thing with horizons is that they are ever-changing, depending on where you are. Move towards them, and… they move farther away.

But if I don’t move towards those horizons… if I limit my movements to the current view, the current horizon? Am I not giving myself the chance to achieve more? Have I built walls around my dreams?

And what could I do if I expanded those horizons… if I knocked down those walls?

As in, my head was spinning yesterday morning from my idiocy and just an all around off morning. Good grief. (I know, I sound like Charlie Brown, but … it’s the perfect phrase for this…).

My morning included messing up formatting (formatting!) on a proposal document, realizing at 10:30 am that my fly was down all morning, and having a sore arm from my shots the previous day.

And then this morning I remembered…as we are all remembering today.

The clear, cloudless sky and the day that things changed forever.

I remember it especially because it was a pivotal week in my life – for many reasons – and because I started the job later that fall that led me down the path I am on now.

The reason I got that job was linked to what happened 18 years ago today. I will never forget that – for my own personal reasons. I know no one else who lived through it will ever forget it either.

It stuns me that the students who are first-years this year were born either that year or the year after, and that they have no memories other than what they have been told and what they have seen through the years.

Time marches on. We get caught up in the pettiness of our everyday lives, annoyed at ourselves for screwing up formatting, or forgetting to zip our fly… and then we are brought up short, remembering how in an instant, life can change.

The formatting doesn’t matter.
The wardrobe dysfunction doesn’t matter.
Not in the grand scheme of things.

I needed that reminder – that I am a small (very, very small) cog in the wheels of the universe. That I have the power to put the positive, the good, the light into the world with every breath…

Time to make the choice for today. I choose light. I hope you do, as well.