The Little Things
Recently, when someone asks me, “what have you been up to?” my mind draws a blank. I struggle to come up with a response that feels worthy of a conversation. My instinct is to say “nothing much, just working and going about life”. I already feel bored with my response before it even comes out of my mouth. In reality, I am doing a lot. I interact with a lot of people at my job, I experience waves of different feelings, and I’m out observing the world pretty much every day. So why is it that when I am asked what I’ve been up to, I bottle my response down to such a small boring phrase?
Part of my answer is that I don’t want to take up a lot of space. I’ve never liked that feeling, and have always found it more fun to hear someone else talk about themselves. In my journey of personal growth, I’ve realized that I deserve to take up space, and part of that involves talking about myself and the sometimes mundane parts of everyday life.
The other part is that I am not engaging with and remembering what happens in my life as much as I want to. A challenge I have given myself is to document the little things. The observation of the stranger on the subway, the fleeting joy when my work was called out in a work call, or just the taste of a warm lunch on a cold winter day. As I’m living my life, I have so many thoughts but all of them slip away, forgotten into some unknown wilderness in my brain. These are the little stories I want to tell my friends when they ask me what I’ve been up to.
