Starting Anew...

They say a fresh start, a new beginning can do wonders for the spirit. You can mentally shake it all out, erase the slate and begin again. I think we all hope that with these new beginning there will be a new path, that we will avoid the mistakes we have made before and become stronger, happier people on a direct path towards satisfaction. Maybe starting again isn't the way to achieve this. Maybe we need to hold on to our past mistakes, our bumps and bruises to remind us that we have lived. That we aren't perfect and unscathed. That we fought valiantly in that battle and even if we lost that at least we tried. With this new start I bring with me my old experiences. I link to "alert n caffeinated" as a precious memory of where I have been. It isn't all pretty in there. The errors that spell check couldn't catch are obvious and blaring but it's real. This isn't a journey of forgetting but of moving forward. 

The mid-life crisis is a thing of the past, replaced by the quarter-life crisis of this generation. We are lost and confused at this young age. We are in a world struggling for identity, one who has lost it's sense of direction and flow. And through all this, we are thriving. We are living and loving and struggling through. We are waking up everyday to fulfill the responsibilities that we want so badly to shake off but know that it is these scars that will shape us. We seek at this quarter mark to "begin anew" to wake up in the morning and find that our identities have returned. They have crawled back through the window in the middle of the night to let us know that they are home. And with these ideas, with these identities beside us we are daring to risk it all for a new life. We are daring to leave it all behind for a kitchen, a camera, a big wave. We are daring to reopen the American Dream and start a life that is of our own choosing. There isn't a reason to let the cubicle walls suck your spirit into the florescent lights. This age of uncertainty is the perfect time to take on the adventure of making a career out of what you love. 

For me this adventure needs only two small, travel-size pieces: a camera and a pen with unlimited ink...