(Brief) Rocky Mountain Reflections

I had every intention of using my trip to Colorado as a clean slate. I assured myself that without the daily obligations of work, commuting, errands, and Netflix, I would have 10 days of extreme productivity in the fields in which I am actually interested. Dreams of breathtaking scenery captured on camera, numerous blog posts, and even a solid start to a novel danced in my head.

At this point in my life I know the dangers of extremely high expectations and unrealistic goals, but I couldn’t help it. I told myself I needed the time away to be worth it, because it was all I was going to get before I was greeted back into my everyday life with a flurry of library-related meetings and trainings.

Basically what I am saying is I thought I would have enough time and inspiration during my trip to write a blog a day, and now here I am almost three weeks after its inception and I haven’t posted anything. Though it was honestly an incredible trip, it did not meet all of my extreme expectations (shocker). The main thing I always seem to forget to factor in is myself. I never account for my own laziness. Looking back, it makes no sense that I expected the vacation alone to do all the work. I wasn’t going to magically be productive simply because I was given a stretch of time far away from here.

Although, I think that’s something we all have to realize once in a while. Let’s say we want to write a book or start running regularly or finally realize our longstanding dream of adapting Game of Thrones to a one-man show for children’s birthday parties. The excuses we typically give for falling short on making these things a reality are lack of time, lack of money, working too much, being too tired from working so much, laziness, and just being friggin depressed about life in general and therefore not able to muster up the motivation to proceed with these goals. On my trip I was able to silence most of these complaints. I had over a week of free time where I was away from work and was expected to pay for very little. I was tired from all of the constant driving and hiking and lack of quality sleep, but it was a very different tired than 12-hour-work-day tired. Basically I had to admit to myself that the only thing left in my way was my own lack of motivation and laziness. I didn’t even have hours of Netflix to watch (though the unit and hotels did have HGTV which was a very bad thing) and I still spent most of my time just staring out a car window whilst fighting off carsickness or scouring Pinterest in an uncomfortable rented bed.

One thing I will give myself credit for is the amount of reading I got to catch up on. Normally when I go on a trip I bring a ridiculously large stack of books and only finish about a chapter of any of them. This time I weaned my stack to four books and read four books (though oddly enough, not the four I brought, because I bought more in Colorado. I know, I’m so weird). Although, the whole time I was reading, I was constantly thinking, I just want to put this down and start writing one of these damn things! Sometimes I could not follow through with this thought because of a lack of laptop or writing utensil. More often, though, it was because when it got down to me and a blinking curser, I just felt too overwhelmed with the scale of possible projects to continue.

Even though Colorado was a breath of fresh air I absolutely needed, it surprised me that it wasn’t in the way I’d originally thought. It taught me that wherever and whenever I venture in my life, I’m always taking me along. Therefore, if I want to actually pursue something that interests me (such as The Book), it is me  that I have to work with and change, more than anything else. You would think this would be a very obvious observance, but it surprises me how many things about myself I continue to be ignorant of.

So anyway, that is what I’m working on now. For the time being I am not dreaming of a change in location or employment or monetary status. I am not longing for more time. I am simply utilizing the way of life I currently possess  (because I must be grateful and admit I have a pretty great one) to see what I can achieve from where I stand now.

I have more detailed entries about my trip that I will be posting later, because despite what I’ve said I did manage to write a little bit during the trip (mainly when we were barreling down mountain roads in pelting night rain and I wasn’t sure if we were actually going to make it out alive, so I thought there should be a record of our travels).