Limitlessness

I love the rain. The love the sound it makes lightly tapping on windows, tapping on the pavement. I love the way the world sort of has this earthy smell and almost seems to wake up and yawn at the world from a long slumber. I love the way the rain falls from a place you can’t touch. It kisses your face, your eyes, your cheek.

A rainy day can make you slow down. You drive a little bit slower; your music selection is a little more mellow. A rainy day can make you notice things. Things you wouldn’t normally stop to really see. It can make you more kind. More forgiving. More understanding.

I come inside from sitting on my stoop watching the rain, shiver a bit in my sweater, slid my boots off and let them fall to the floor and put on a pot of tea. I hug that cup of tea in my hands and soak up this feeling of almost reawakening from a long slumber of my own.

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I went to the movies the other week and saw the preview for one of the new Leonardo Dicaprio movies, Inception. There was a line he said in the movie that really resonated with me…

“Never recreate from your memory, always imagine new places.”

I found myself pondering this simple thought repeatedly the remainder of the evening.

Only a few short years post college graduation, and I can already make the statement that college was the best time of my life thus far. I went to the most elite school for photography, and I excelled there. I had a great group of girl friends. I had the best guy. I had a huge vision for myself; for the greatness that the world after graduation would prove to be.

I graduated. We all did. And we all moved on from the temporary friendships we had in each other. We broke up. There wasn’t going to be a sunny apartment in the city for us to explore our new journey together in. The huge vision of working with a big time photographer wasn’t coming true, as I had hoped. The greatness of the world after college through my rose colored glasses wasn’t proving to be as shiny as I thought it would be. I had such high expectations that life would continue on this Starbucks for breakfast and Redbull and vodka for dinner lifestyle with my girl friends still there and the love of my life by my side.

I guess I didn’t really anticipate the amount of change I was about to experience. Change in my life and in myself. My life kept propelling forward as my life in Santa Barbara faded out of sight through my rearview mirror.

The past couple years I’ve been trying to get back there. I’ve been trying to recreate who I was then, how I felt then and what I had then, from what I remembered of the best time of my life. I thought if I could get those feelings back, I could certainly apply that outlook and good fortune to my life now and I would surely be the happiest I could be again. But I’ve come to discover the flaw in my plan. I’m not the same girl anymore. And it’s not such a bad thing…

For a while now I thought I was doing something wrong. I thought I had lost parts, large parts, of who I was along the way because so many things that I associated myself with were no longer. But the beauty in it is, I can be whoever I want to be now.

I stopped imagining somewhere along the way when I realized my past is now my history. I didn’t want to accept a new face for myself. Who would I be without that place? Without those people? Without that man? Without that life? And the answer is so simple…anyone I want.

We are never only the sum of what we’ve done. We have the potential to be what we imagine. We have the ability to imagine new places, new experiences, new people, new adventures in this lifetime that we can live out to the fullest potential.

Life doesn’t stop. Don’t decide to let your wide eyes and belief in the greatness of the world hinder based on any of the past. The present is the outcome of our previous choices, but the constant imagining of new places allows for limitlessness in tomorrow…limitlessness for the rest of your life.