simplicity.

Not something I’m too good at.  I like to make things complicated.  If given an easy task, I will find a way to make it harder.  My husband calls this “Christie-izing” things, and it’s true.  Maybe it’s the gymnast in me.  Or the masochist.  I like things to be difficult.  What’s the point of doing something if it’s easy? tends to be my mindset, though I know that it’s completely absurd and unnecessary.

Same goes for my daily schedule.  I have always been one who typically has every waking and sleeping moment of my 24-hour period planned out down to the minute, but this past year was a little over the top.  6:30am-10:00pm usually involved any minute-to-minute combination of working one of my three jobs, going to class, studying, volunteering, leading or attending Bible studies, and making sure there was time for “planned socialization” (though, while fun, still can be draining at the end of a long day).  All of those things are good things, but taken together, and in the volume and pace at which I took them, was overwhelming.  I managed somehow.  But I didn’t feel like I could thrive.

Enter Pasadena.

For now, all I have to do is go to school all day.  That’s it.  Nothing else.

Life is simple.

It seems too easy.  And that part of me, that part that screams for complexity and overload, that part of me is getting a taste of life devoid of those things.  I’m not bored.  I’m engaged.  I’m intellectually challenged in my grad school program, and yet, I come home and I am not stressed.  I have  time to do everything I want.  After a year of wishing that I could invent an IV that would administer a caffeine drip into my arm throughout the day because I just didn’t have time to do everything I wanted to do AND get a good night’s sleep, I am at a place where that is no longer necessary.  I can come home and eat a snack, take a nap, watch some Friends, scrapbook, make a good dinner, soak in the tub, take my time getting my lunch and clothes ready for the next day, study, AND still go to bed early.  Who would have thought that was possible?

I know that this eutopia will not last forever.  In fact, I know that once Fall semester begins at the end of August, this flow vanish.  But for now, for this time that I am thrust into balance and simplicity, I am embracing it.