Sit with my thoughts.

April 10th.

I wrote about how I felt things happen quickly here. That means I’m running. All the time, running around. I’m commuting. I’m studying. I’m exploring.

But I could not do this, be here, if I didn’t stop occasionally to sit with the thoughts I am formulating on everything I see and experience. I am doing things that I have spent what feels like forever dreaming about. I went to Paris and couldn’t even comprehend the experience for even a week because my mind could not wrap around the idea that I had just done something I had thought about for years.

I started taking my nightly walks or my walk home as my moments to plug into myself, dive into my tangled web of thoughts and start to address and acknowledge all of the thoughts I have about the things I have seen. If I just carried on and kept piling on and on I think I would fear missing something, missing some opportunity to uncover that gold nugget of a thought that will drive my actions through the next year or even decade. In fact, who I was for nearly three years was driven by the in-depth and challenging reflection I pushed myself to do after an immersion-mission trip to Belize. The experiences I encountered there could not just be had on the surface. They were more than just staring at the twinkling Eiffel Tower, they were raw and hard and being forced to sit with those thoughts every night. To journal daily and focus on the tumultuous thoughts that resulted from what I was seeing and feeling drove me to who I am today. So I can’t just let myself soak in the view of the Thames flowing past me every evening. I need to think about the consequence of what it is to be doing this, to be here, to be learning. I need to think about what it means and how I feel. I need to do more than wonder but now, it’s time to reflect.

I came off of a challenging last six months before coming to England and I could have said that I had walked myself into a valley. I stood in that the valley and only tried to climb back up. I didn’t let myself sit because I didn’t want to think I was dwelling in the low. Because there’s no dignity in that. I wanted to maintain my dignity and it was my pride that tied my ankles to the ground. I came to Europe with one foot still in the valley and the distractions of this place kept me going for a good amount of time before I knew that I would have to go back to the valley in order to get out completely this time. In going back I realized that the choice to go into myself, to go lower so that I can sit with and address the harder thoughts in the deep of my brain is stronger than trying to get out before I am ready. Choosing to go down into those deeper thoughts gave me strength and pushed me to grow out of any lows, out of the valley and into the light. Sitting with my thoughts, wrapping myself up in them let me process and change and be challenged. It’s pushed me and shaped me and helped me grow.

I drew this when sketch when not only thinking about sitting with my thoughts in Europe to process everything I am doing but also in thinking about the idea that in the valley, when we go into ourselves, or when we fall low it’s okay to sit there with the thoughts that come in our hardships and wrestle with them, wear them, process them. Because it’s in the valley in which we have the most capability to grow out of it.