If anything, this trip to Los Angeles has shown me the fleeting present moment, and the tiny blips along the way that actually make up our lives. If you are not there to see a nephew's smile as he lifts up his head, or to look out at the ocean as your brother and sister-in-law are surfing the waves together, it does not happen. It is easy to get caught up in your daily life and look only at pictures from the other side of the country. Not until you see them, live with them, wake up in the morning and see a snuggled up baby on the couch and your brother reading next to him that you realize: this is as fleeting as that facebook post you read last week.
When I went to Jamaica this past February, it was the same thing. Once I changed my daily schedule of up, coffee, dog out, work, home, run, chill... I realized there was more to me and more to my story than that. Maybe it is not the end of my writing career, as it has felt this past year as I moved more towards the tech industry.
Maybe it is just (another) beginning. A way to transform the end of newspapers and paper books to a way we can communicate with one another besides updates and photos. We all have stories to tell, someone told me this week. It is also what my own parents have been encouraging for years, and what prompted my first story: The Unicorn and the Princess (age 5?). At that point, I had a big book with blank pages with the unicorn on the cover. It was my space to write in. If we don't have that space, we don't write.
And if we don't physically spend time with our loved ones, we don't really connect, and we don't really experience our lives with them. Our lives are just a fleeting blip. Don't miss a second of it.
