Shoganai …It can’t be helped (or can it?)

Loneliness strikes when you least expect it to. Or perhaps, I should have been more mindful. After three weeks with family and dear friends traveling and gallivanting across Asia, ordinary life in the Midwest seems just a little bit empty, one-dimensional and yep, a little lonely.

Still … I was always proud to say that I didn’t mind my own company. And yet at this moment, I’m finding my company lacking and quite frankly, a little dull.

I’m still busy as a bee, and feeling trepidation about my over-planned weekly schedule. Between school, work, volunteer gigs, side projects, prepping for my summer field season, and the nagging minor matter of my GREs, technically, I should be too damn busy to think!

But think I do, and mull and ponder also. I think I sometimes miss a life that doesn’t revolve around me. Where everything that happens, happens because I make it so, and decide to do it. A life derailed because of circumstance, chance events, weather, or an unexpected phone call. I miss the chaos of life that I see in others.

My life is ridiculously regimented, in no small part, because I make it so. I feel more efficient and productive when I am able to tick things off my list. I have scheduled down to the number of hours that I will work, study, run; the number of times a week I can watch a movie (once); what day of the week I can cook for the following week, etc.

All this scheduling has made me yearn all the more for the impishness of life and its unexpected moments of complete turmoil.

My first week in Malaysia recently was marked by a remarkable series of events: a ridiculous extravagance of seafood, killing my first roach in years (after all the wildlife I have done, amazingly I haven’t lost my squeamishness for roaches!), stung by a jellyfish (with scars to prove it), and collecting buckets of water for an almost island-wide disruption of our greatest natural resource.

For three weeks in Asia, I lived outside my life and found it to be good. Now I just need to figure out how to regularly schedule an occasional event of pandemonium, and I’d be in fine shape. I’d feel alive again: less robotic, less put-together, less perfect.

Or maybe I just need to do less, be less, and be ok with that.