Rejoice! The time has come—it’s now the month of February, I’m still writing down “2019”, and people have officially stopped writing up their years in review on all forms of social media.

It’s the third week of the second month, and I have written nothing new. So apparently, my subconscious nor I have acknowledged the whole “new year’s resolution” mentality by jumpstarting on new work. I also haven’t read anything new—in fact, I just finished Little Women yesterday after starting it back in late December. (I have a lot of feelings about both movie renditions, mind you, but I’ll save that for another date.) I’m in the market for a new read, and you’d think that I would just pluck one off of my mountain of books in my room, but you’d be mistaken. I have my eyes on one not in my collection, and I’m always in the market for a new book.

I do in fact hate years in review posts, but… alas. I feel like I must share mine in order to explain the rest of this post. Here’s just a small bullet point list of what has happened thus far:

I graduated from college
I got a job
I got a dog
I went back to my (hair) roots and got a pixie cut again
I moved to a new house

A lot of life-changing things have happened, and although they’ve been exciting, it’s been a nightmare emotionally speaking. I have lived in the same house all my life, only moving when I went out of state for college 5 years ago. I commuted my freshman year, lived on campus for the next two years, and then moved into a house in my senior year of college. So when I moved just a few weeks ago into the house that I’m now in, it was a rough transition. I felt extremely homesick even though I hadn’t fully lived in my childhood home for 5 years, I had a new commute, my roommate and I were getting used to living together without the other two roommates from the previous house, and add a new dog and a cat into the mix, and you’ll have a stressed-out Reagan.

Before all of the things I listed had happened, I was getting pretty impatient for them to come to pass. I don’t know about you, but I have a real talent for looking forward to something or stressing about something so much that I have a difficult time fully connecting with things and people in the present. Because of this, I like to repeat something to myself that Ram Dass once said: Be here now. I have clearly forgotten these words these past few weeks because I was a mess pre-move and mid-move—I was just a ball of emotions and stress. I wasn’t able to enjoy my life for what it was in the moments of transition. Stress, joy, excitement, and every other emotion comes and goes in waves. And it’s hard not to get swept up in it when you’re at your highest or at your lowest. But that’s kind of a weird bonus about life. It’s never boring even when it feels like it.

Reagan Fleming