Life is a Monet
Current mood: adventurous

This weekend was especially encouraging for me. And I suppose I should write it all down before I dont see it anymore. 

I have been struggling with the same battle for months. Here is the thing that keeps me flying in emotional circles: it seems that “it is always something.” And I keep coming back to the statement “Happiness is a Choice”. The idea that life is never going to come together in my perfect Hallmark Card. Instead that I have to learn to be thankful for all things in all seasons. Unfortunately this means even in the seasons in which you are waiting for change. Even if that season is much to much, and more than twice as long as you wished for.

Over the weekend I talked to my dear friend, and I suddenly had this grand, very simple realization. Life is a Monet. We’ve all heard guys and girls called Monet’s….people who “From far away look super hot, but up close, their faces are kinda a mess.”

My realization was that life is that way. When hearing adventurous stories of your friends getting lost in train stations half way around the world, not knowing how they were going to get home and being incredibly late for important meetings, life seems like some wild and romantic novel. Sitting on the other end of the phone line, I could help but jealously sob at why I wasnt getting lost at some train station, and instead I feel helplessly stuck in a life that isnt moving.

But the truth is, when you are sitting on the wrong train in a country that you have never been to, and realize that you dont know where you are, and that you ARE going to miss the meeting, where the romantic adventure feelings? You never have any! Anxious, nerves, spinning thoughts. These are the moments where you look at your life and realize “Its a MESS. I’m falling apart. Why can’t it ever be just easy? Why don’t things just come together for me EVER?”

But here is the thing: six months later when you are sharing the story over a dinner table of your closest friends, glasses of wine and appetizers, you dont remember that horrible mess part. You are far away, and dont see all of the tiny dots of paint that never made sense. You see the art and the beauty of the whole struggle. You see the masterpiece that has been created through such abstract movement and fortunes.

So as my friend Liz said “Jenni, life always looks exciting from half a world away. Believe me, you may feel like you are always struggling to choose happiness, but from down here you look like you are the main character of the greatest adventure novel ever written.”

And you know…she is right. And I need to remember that more.

But that is the battle. Getting it one weekend. Seeing the forest for the trees, and understanding why things are the way that they are. And it is just a glimpse. Because in a few days I most definitely will forget the view I just saw. And I will go back to seeing only the trees, and missing the forest. Seeing all of the chaotic strokes of paint and mis-matched colores. Never seeing the portrait that is really being painted.

I will come full circle again and again. I will forget and be reminded. I will choose to be happy today. I will hate my job, and my romantic life, and my car, and my computer, and my social plans. I will hate that I do have to choose to be happy. And some how, struggleing through the mess, and choosing to at least TRY to see the beauty is what makes these seasons not mere chaotic strokes of paint, but real art masterpieces.