When the best adventure is the settling

People have a habit of telling us to never, never, never settle. As if to settle is to fail. Sometimes, I think this is really good advice, but, as is such the case with almost all advice, it's not exactly a one-size-fits-all diagnosis for life.

Sometimes, settling is good. Sometimes, it's necessary.

The past few years of my life have been the epitome of adventure. I graduated university. I moved. I got a job. I quit my job. I moved again. I met a man. I traveled around a country so grand it sometimes didn't feel real. I moved and traveled more and more and then, I got married and moved yet again. And finally (finally) things started to settle.

But then something strange happened: I started to feel like I was doing something wrong. Like I was somehow wasting my opportunity to live as a full-fledged adventurer. And the more I looked at the perfect highlight reels of Instagram and Facebook and the blogosphere and the more people I met who had just come to Australia, still fresh in the tourist state of mind, the more inadequate my own life felt.

How absurd!
 
How absurd that I would think this life of mine, that was so carefully and generously crafted for me, that allowed me to live and work in Australia, that allowed me to marry a man far beyond my wildest dreams, that allowed me to feel deeply, in-my-bones, at home, could somehow be not adventurous enough. And that was when I realized that the collective they, who keep demanding I never, never, never settle, were wrong.

Sometimes, settling is good. Sometimes, it's the best kind of adventure.

For nearly two years, my life felt like one giant transition. Nothing felt steady or substantial, and very few things felt like real life, whatever that means. But over the past few weeks, with visas being approved and jobs being provided and business ventures moving forward, life has felt more regular. More normal. I'd be lying if I said I never envy the vagabond lifestyle. But I'd be lying even more if I said this settlement isn't the adventure for which my heart has been aching.

Hopefully with the coming of cooler weather and the more regular schedules, we'll be able to venture out a bit more. No matter how often or how far out of our suburb of cafes and sights we venture, though, I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to have settled, even if it means my weekend trips are fewer, my social media feeds less extravagant, and my day-to-day grind more typical. To have the opportunity to settle, after all this time? What an adventure.

What's your adventure looking like these days?

Life lately + Stuff I've read

 

It's been rather quiet around these parts lately, largely in part to the whole getting married, honeymooning, and flying back to Australia hullabaloo. Stephen and I arrived in Sydney a week ago, and between unpacking, organising our new home, getting back into regular schedules and leaving our laptop charger in the States, a chance to blog simply refused to appear. Naturally, part of me wants to sit and write about these precious, early days of marriage and how we're loving this life together. 

But then I remember how long it's been since I blogged about a book...

My November novel was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. It's a title I've heard time and again, and when I saw a copy for $10 in the airport, I thought I'd give it a shot. And may I just say, it was a shot well taken.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the most perfect coming-of-age story. It resonates in a way that feels far more real than much of today's popular coming-of-age literature (I think the term "literature" is used loosely), inviting the reader not only to sit in that familiar place of I've been there, but also challenging him or her to experience something new. It's a story of growing up in Brooklyn, becoming the sort of person that can flourish in any circumstance, much like a tree growing up between blocks of sidewalk, and the countless ways in which growing up feels unfinished and uncertain.

This book, it gets me. It is so many things that I have found myself being, from a young girl feeling somehow out of place to a young adult unsure if this is how everyone else feels when they reach certain milestones. Sure, Smith's novel finishes with the protagonist, Francie, turning 16 and getting ready for a date and I'm 24 and newly married, but even in the countless differences, there are gorgeous similarities.

The writing is beautiful, in a way that it so rarely is anymore. What I love most about this story is that it ends totally unfinished. Sure, there's a sense of resolution, but far greater than that sense of resolution is the sense that there is more to come, that as life progresses, so do our stories. We ought to find ourselves within these pages, but we ought not to stay there.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was the perfect wedding week story. It carried me to fond memories and then released me into a grand future and even though this post is obviously Stuff I've read, it's also everything that has happened lately and all the things that are about to.

I'm home now, and I hope you'll keep letting me share this adventure with you.

Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a great bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only thing: to trample on some other woman...it was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little conssequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on dividing the line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

My Dressember adventure is going strong and has been such fun; I'll be writing about it, and other life things, soon. In the meantime, if you'd like to make a donation to the Dressember Foundation, click here.