Make a Life not a Living.

I love love love love this! Although the author is unknown, they sure know what their talking about. Read it, let it sink in and then read it again.

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways , but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbour. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We’ve done larger things, but not better things.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete …

-Going to meet my neighbours, Maddie

Raincoats and Excuses

Today is a little bit too cold for a day in August. I mean, I realize that I live in Canada and these things can happen, but you just shouldn’t have to wear jeans, two sweatshirts and a raincoat in the middle of summer. And yes I also realize that it’s basically the end of summer (boo-hoo) but still!

Sometimes it seems like the weather is mimicking whats happening in life. Summer comes and school finishes and it becomes so hot that all you can do is lay around and be lazy. Just as Mother Nature becomes lazy with her natural brand of air conditioning. Then, as the leaves change colors so do we, we head off for first grade or we change citys completely, in search of what we hope to be the pathway to a better life. Which brings me to another point.

I move in exactly one week. I start learning a new language in a new school in a new city in a new home. I’m not excited and I’m not nervous, and thats what scares me the most. In high school we are conditioned to believe that University is the only way to go. Get and education, get a job, start a family. For a while I believed it, I had nothing else to go on, no other information to look into, but now I’m not so sure. I really have no clue what career I want...but I definitely do know what I want my LIFE to look like. I want to travel and live all over the world, I want to meet as many people as I can and help as many as I can, I want as little work and as much play as I can manage,I want to sing and play guitar and love. Can you think of any cookie-cutter careers that look like that? Nah, neither can I.

I found this quote on the Facebook page of a new friend thats going to be going to my University (Ironic?): “If it’s important to you, you will find a way. If it’s not, you will find an excuse” I’m not sure who said it but I think it sums up my feels exactly. I wonder how long it will take me to invent my way out of Uni...

-Putting another sweater on, Maddie

The Smell Of Change

Isn’t it strange how a new place can inspire new ideas. The way I see it, we come prepared with all the ideas we will ever need in our life floating around in our head. It just takes new experiences and maybe a few lessons learnt to pull them out and make them legible to us. It’s also strange how things always seem to come around right when you need them the most (If you know it or not).

A few months ago I was sitting at home freaking out at Kijiji because there weren’t any places for rent around the University I had just got accepted to. Everything had already been rented out and I was having visions of me living in my parents home for the rest of my life. But then, a friend I had met in that Community College course that I grumpily took to make my parents happy in their attempt to keep me at home for as long as they could, contacted me because he had been accepted into the same University as me. So here I am, three months later, sitting in our new downtown apartment, tired from scrubbing the floors clean and removing the dead, dried out fish I found in the cupboard (the sad thing is, thats not even a joke...). As I sit here alone, listening to the sound of a lawnmower cutting the grass ten floors below me, I search my mind for flaws to the theory that “everything happens for a reason” I can’t find any and thats reassuring.

Not everything in life is going to turn out the way you think its going to. In fact, maybe nothing will turn out the way you had planned. But I think thats alright, someone, somewhere out there has something in mind for your life. You just have to learn to listen to that little voice and trust its judgment. It’s okay to have future goals for yourself but don’t get too caught up in them, if you always have everything planned out with no margin for error you might miss something really great that you’d never expect to do. Change is good. It’s always good in my opinion. After all, if nothing ever changed there’d be no butterflies.

-Forever changing, Maddie.