isn't this paradise?

011

Hey hey,

Ya know in the past week I realized that there is shouldn’t be some arbitrary once-per-week blog article timeline I force myself into. Sometimes, I have more thoughts. Sometimes, I have less. But it’s nice to wake up and feel like I have something to work on and to create something new. That’s a feeling I’m hoping to cultivate on the daily.

This weekend I’m visiting home and I woke up in my childhood bedroom again. I was here not too long ago for the summer, but the brief weeks that have passed at school have felt like a lifetime has passed in a blink of an eye. With school comes a barrage of priorities that get dumped all at once, and those priorities shift around the priorities that were already there in my head.

Anyways, there’s been a subtle existential dread that’s kind of been hovering over my head as I go into job-application season. I saw this coming when I first came to college, and now it’s time to start looking into the next season of life. After 3 years of warm up, the time has finally come. With how bad the tech job market is right now, I’m reluctant to put my head down and start spamming away on Indeed and LinkedIn. I’m even more reluctant to get back my LeetCode chops to prepare for the interviews. Really, I’m just dreading it all. I feel like I’m hyping myself up to go all or nothing into this application season like a serious athletic season. I feel like I have to be self-destructive to get it right. At it’s core, it’ll define the first steps of my career path, so I better take it seriously, right?

But visiting home again and having a slow morning, though, has really had me zoom out a bit. The familiar sounds of the neighbors mowing their lawn and the birds chirping on the tree outside. The same cul-de-sac where I used to bike, now filled with the new kids on the street. The familiar and wholly unique smell of the AC vents that fill the home. Mom and dad making the same breakfast they’ve made for the past decade. Lying on the couch where I used to stay when I got sick. When I was younger I swore to myself I wouldn’t forget what it felt like to be a kid - I’m realizing now that when you grow up you just don’t spend as much time remembering. It’s always go go go. The taste of the soup and the spot I’d look up at in the ceiling when I was sick --- now those are memories I haven’t revisited until now.

The strange feeling that I still miss this place --- and the fact that I used to miss it so much more. Coming back here in my first year of college, when I was homesick, felt like being saved from drowning. Now, those feelings still linger in the air. But these days it’s more a gift than I’m back, rather than a relief.

A slow morning is some life changing stuff. It’s like a rare pokemon I can’t seem to track down, and only appears when I least expect it. The peacefulness of starting your day with not much to do aside from breakfast and lying down. The sense that obligations, today, can wait for the sunlight to pass through the windows in the back of the house.

What’s crazier is that whenever I come back from my 100MPH life at school, I find my parents right where I left them. My mom can lie down on the couch for a slow afternoon. My dad can write his calligraphy, in that medley of refrigerator, backyard, and AC noises that make up the ever so familiar silence that you can only find in my kitchen. This is the life they’ve constructed for themselves. That elusive slow morning, baked in.

Isn’t this paradise? Right here, right where I left it?

So in the gloom of a job search that seems more mentally draining and spiritually degrading as each day goes by, I sometimes remind myself that life is still right happening right in front of me, waiting to be enjoyed like a slow morning, even if it feels like I’m on a bullet train zooming by. I find myself looking for those moments of peace now. Think less. Just be. It always feels forced if I sit down to meditate for ten minutes, like right after the ten minutes I switch right back into to-do list mode.

But these days I’m trying to create longer pockets of peace, where I get my mind to myself. At least for a while.

Until next time,

Evan