I don't believe in New Years' Resolutions

Despite how excited I was to come home this Christmas (and we are talking giddy excited), I was a little worried about having to answer the same dreaded question over and over again, "So what are you doing with your life?".

It seems that people expect me to have it all figured out. They want to know if I like my current job. Will I stay with them for a year? Two years? Will I look for another job? What kind of job do I think I can get? How long will I stay at that job? Do I want to travel? Where do I want to travel? When will I travel? Do I have a boyfriend? Do I plan on finding one when I get back? (Like it's that easy.) Do I have any friends? Will I join any clubs or groups to make friends? When will I come back to Texas? Will I live in Austin or Dallas? Have I thought about going back to school? What grad program would I want to do?

Here's the only questions I have: What the hell is the rush?

Since I don't have any answers to these questions I started telling people I was living on a six month plan. This is something I used when I first decided to move to London six months go (side note: can you believe it was six months ago?). I discovered it was acceptable to not know the answers to these questions so long as you explained that you knew you didn't know. Weird, right? But it worked. I've been leaning on this as a crutch, all most, to keep myself from having to think too far ahead. What I didn't realize until this Christmas is that it's true. I am living in the short term and I am really, truly, happy with that.

I came to England in September with absolutely no plan. That's terrifying and down right stupid. But, do you know isn't terrifying and stupid? Coming to England for three months. That's not scary at all. So I lived from September to December and I found a job, and I kind of enjoy that job, and I get paid well, and I travelled to Dublin, and I visited Holland, and I made a couple of friends, and when I came back to Texas for Christmas I was considered successful in my venture.

Now, I just have to make it to April. I'll keep going to work, maybe even find another job better suited to me skills and interests. I'll visit a few more countries and experience exciting things I otherwise wouldn't be able to. I am thinking about joining a theatre troop. I have set a few "professional goals" for myself that involve becoming more active in design again - rebranding my website and my business cards, building my portfolio on my own, reading more design and ad books, visiting museums, and trying to get more design projects at work. You might say these are "New Years' Resolutions", but I don't think of them that way. If something is important to you, you shouldn't have to wait until January 1st to promise yourself you'll drop 10 lbs or quit smoking. It's just a coincidence that I have promised these things to myself at the beginning of the New Year. I am going to take active steps towards these "resolutions", but I have no idea if any of it will happen. It could be that I'll never find a proper job, that I can't travel, that I find myself lonely and homesick, and that I suck at design. Maybe. I don't know. But it doesn't matter, does it? Not in a long term king of way. This next three months is so miniscule in the grand scheme of my life. All I have to do is live as best I can and wait to see what might happen next.

This isn't to say that I am now completely passive in my life and will just wait for the tide to pull me where it will. No, not at all. I have an idea of what I think I would like to do and I am going to do my best to achieve that ideal. But, I am not going to stress myself out if something doesn't go "according to plan". I feel like people get too caught up in the future and forget about the now. I just want to enjoy what I am doing without having to taint it with fears and worries. I am too young to tie myself down like that. I'm not sure when I'll hit that magic age when I have to "grow up", but I figure I'll know when I get there.

So, for now anyway, I am playing it by ear. I was explaining this to a family friend and his response was, "you really have your shit together". I kind of laughed and said that it's really easy to look like you have it together when you, in fact, have nothing to put together. I find that this outlook really simplifies things for me and makes it (life) so much easier to handle.

I said it once, and I'll say it again: Puppets really are smarter than people. I'd like to believe that my life philosophy is a bit more complicated than a spoof Sesame Street musical could understand (and, honestly, it is), but I find this lyric to be a nice little cliffs note version of what I am talking about here: "Everything in life is only for now".