"Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement. " Golda Meir

This summer it will be five years since we moved into our little brick house. Yes, five. I remember giddily coming over before we were married, sweeping dusty wood floors and scrubbing every surface,  trying to imagine how we'd fill these bare rooms. (Now the struggle is keeping them as bare as we want) There was a little thrill each time I'd turn the key and think Here I go into my house! So very grown up.

But never did I think that we would stay here for more than a year or two. Nope. We had plans to be abroad, trying out new corners of the earth, eating new fruits and making our brains function in unknown languages. I pictured myself teaching at a little school, maybe having kids if I was so lucky, but either way I knew and know that there is something in me that comes alive when I am somewhere unfamiliar and new. And that there is just so much out there and my life will not last long enough to experience even a small portion of it.

So sometimes, sweeping these floors (for the twelfth time that day) with a little less excitement than I did our first summer, I think about all the why's and how we are still here. Teaching, masters degrees, pregnancies, dream jobs, music, family. The gratitude for what we have here, because we are still here is real. We have been truly blessed.  But the feeling that we need to go will not leave. We've set a goal for one year from now. And it feels much too far away.

"I am my problem. I am also my solution."

Sometimes little snippets of language have a way of getting inside me and reappearing in my head without being consciously called forth. Those two sentences have been that this week for me, as I think about ideal versions of myself and where I am right now.  I've been trying to make more thoughtful choices, and realizing that you make most every choice twice. Once when you actually make it, then again when you either regret it or get a sense of pride/accomplishment/satisfaction out of it. It's been helping me to think first how I'll feel about myself during the after part. Not trying to judge the choice as good or bad, but more on how you'll feel about yourself for having made it, and why.

The idea of loving yourself, loving your life, isn't just something you can say with a smiling face and it becomes true. You have to love who you are choosing to be, how far you have come, how you are choosing to spend your time and interact with those around you. I feel like I can only honestly love myself when I love who I am, choice by choice.

So. I'm working on it. And hopefully in another five years we will 1) not still be in this house 2) but even if we are, I will be much closer to being and doing the goals I wrote down in my journal today. And love myself for it.

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” 
― Walt Whitman