On my way to work this morning, I admitted out loud that I would gladly go back to high school, endure the endless torture, teasing, and awkward moments all over again, if I could only relive the summer months. The child inside of me is dying for less responsibility. It wants to spend its summers basking in the heat, sweating out the bad things, peeling off layers of skin, forming new ideas and identities. It wants a life of freedom. Is this normal?
Of course I want to go back to this life knowing what I know now, impossible, right?
I feel unsettled. I feel absent. I feel something’s not right. I feel I’m on the wrong path. Will I feel this way forever? Does everyone feel this way? Is there always something that’s just not quite right?
I know what I ultimately want. It is simple. It is plain. I just don’t know how to get it.
I don’t know how I ever majored in Accounting, graduated, survived. Whenever I think about money I get an woozy feeling in my stomach. Bills I feel in my left shoulder where my neck meets my back. Money a pang in the middle of my chest accompanied by shortness of breath. Whenever I think about financial security I feel it in my heart as it shatters my dreams.
I want the simple life. And no, not this:
But this:
I want to spend my days in a garden wearing a sunhat, in the company of sunflowers taller than I am. Skin covered in dirt. And during the winter, I want there to be snow on the ground and smoke rising from my chimney from the wood burning stove, my only source of heat. I want to eat canned veggies from my summer yield. I want to make my own clothes. I want to have a dog at my feet. Is any of this too much to ask?
My one problem, how do I afford this life of simplicity?
I find it frighteningly ironic that you can’t even afford to have nothing in this world. Is this really how we have made it, difficult to live with nothing?
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