Slow Down, You Crazy Child

Life is becoming routine.

That makes everything easier. It is stupid things like knowing where to find the grocery store, or what day is trash day. Life really feels like it is starting to fit. I may not know where 99.5% of anything is here yet, but I already have a few favorite places, and that makes me feel like I am going native.

My life here has a rhythm now. Maybe it is just because I am drummer’s daughter (my brilliance is due to hearing paradiddles in the womb, not Mozart) but I do better with a rhythm. Having a job to go to every day, as all consuming and stressful as it can be, has set the tempo for me. On top of that, I have a few friends, a library card, and I don’t just stare blankly when people tell me addresses.

I am not in Kansas anymore. 

I was warned about two things for moving out here:
1.) the traffic.
2.) life, and the people living it here, move exponentially faster than back home.

People were right about the traffic, but I have not noticed a huge difference between the people here and the people anywhere else. People tend to just be people.

Everyone has a natural tempo. I am not sure how much of that is determined by where you live.

My natural tempo tends to be frantic. It seems that I often forget there is a difference between “Live life to the fullest” and “grossly over commit yourself”. Moving to a new city where, until I got my job, my only responsibility was to actually get said job. No social commitments, no obligatory engagements, no possible way to go to the plethora of midwest based facebook events even if I wanted to, and my mind panicked.

I had free time. For the first time in my adult life I had honest-to-goodness-no-end-in-sight free time and I drowned in it. After unpacking and applying for 200 plus jobs online, all I could do was sit and wait for the the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy to air. At first it was THE WORST. I felt like since I wasn’t doing something everysinglesecondofeverysingleday that I was being lazy or wasteful with my time, but that wasn’t the truth.

A week passed, and it got easier.

I noticed things more. I had time to call people I hadn’t called in way too long. I caught up on e-mails.

 

Another week passed, and it became routine.

I did my nails three times. I went to the park just because I could. I sewed a dress. I watched Netflix and didn’t feel guilty. I hung out with my husband for hours and it was awesome.

The pattern continued. Week five ended my unemployment, but I am still far less hurried than I have been the last several years of my life.

Now, almost ten weeks into this LA experiment, I have come to the moral of this portion of my adventure: Living life to fullest is not equal to living life to the busiest. 

Take time to smell the roses ya’ll. And nap with your cat.