Here we are, in the middle of fall semester, getting slammed with school work and midterms. I don't think I have ever had so much school work before in my life... and it is severely showing in my lack of blogging. It is severely showing in my lack of doing most of the stuff that I enjoy, the stuff that keeps me sane. As you can imagine, that saddens me.
While I do not necessarily have time to go lay out by the pool or go sailing on the lake as often as I usually would, I have taken up one habit that I had lost for a very long time. This was my attempt to squeeze in something that I missed dearly: reading. It takes me a lot longer to get through a book these days because I usually only read about a chapter a night, sometimes less if it is a long one. As long as I read a little bit, it satisfies my need. Some nights all I am able to read, before completely passing out, are a few pages, but it is better than nothing. I have also developed a fear that my quality of writing/creative flow of ideas has slowed due to my lack of reading. I used to read about a book a week, sometimes more and sometimes less, and I was constantly learning. Sometimes I would learn more about the punctuation and grammar end of writing in books while other days a story would inspire my creative thoughts and leave me digging my brain for my own cool ideas.
Along with reading, I wrote constantly. I used my ideas in my writings for school, for journaling, for creating my own stories. Of course anything I created at the time probably wasn't anything special due to the fact that I was quite a bit younger than I am now, but at least I kept up with my passions. The older I get, the more I feel like I have less time to do the things that I really enjoy.
You are probably wondering why I have a picture of the book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert pictured above. Well, I originally sat down to give a bit of a review of the book. In away, what I have already written here is the review. The book is about a depressed woman who, after going through a nasty divorce, sets off on a mission to find herself while traveling around the world to Italy, India, and Bali. The book shows her journey as she goes from being at one of the worst points of her life to learning how to be completely at peace with herself and her life. It is an inspiring story that I encourage everyone to read. I randomly selected this book to restart my love of reading daily and it turned out to be the perfect choice. I happened to pick it up for less than a dollar at Goodwill and I feel like I wasn't meant to pick it up until now. It was like God knew I was going to reach a point in the semester where I would need words like that to give me hope and keep me going.
I think that what I am getting at here is that if you are reaching that point in the semester, or even that point with anything, take a breather and do something you love. Go see a movie, pick up a book, hang out with friends, make cookies... whatever you need to do you should do it! It will make you feel better, I promise.
xoxo, tay
