When I went to Chicago I had a lot of time to do nothing. It seems like I’m meant to do a lot of things alone right now. It feels like I’m learning how to trust myself more and that’s requiring these certain experiences to teach me more about myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea of loneliness, and asking myself why this feeling exists in my life. It’s caused me to reflect on myself and ask myself if there are certain people or things I’m relying too heavily on for my happiness. I feel like in life if you don’t decide what it is that makes you happy yourself, you’ll be taken upon the streams of everyone around you, and ultimately the overarching stream of society itself. That’s why I feel like its so hard to break patterns in our life, because it means swimming against the current of everyone’s expectations… and this is definitely an uphill battle.

During my trip I thought about Blooms Emporium a lot… Just like a lot… not in a way that was worrying about it, but more just about all the customers, all the students, and now the young people that work for me. The first passage of opening the business was a huge lesson in emotion and how to manage them in times of stress. Something I don’t like to admit is that I inherited the temper of my father… after all, where else would you learn anything from? So, this has been a lesson in taking time to be patient and asses situations through a different channel other than emotion. Experiences in my apprenticeship and time owning a business have shown me how things escalate in situations and how it is all fueled by unmanaged emotions. Emotions have been the difference between life and death for a lot of people. But I’m really working on my emotional control right now, slowing down and remembering the bigger picture always, and trying to have more compassion in everything. If you sit down to think about it for a second, we don’t know each other like we really think we do. Seldom do we know where others have been in their life, and how much they have been influenced by their unique environments, just like yourself.

In life I feel like everyone is screaming for acceptance but won’t take the time to simply be accepting in an of themselves. I’ve been experiencing a lot of the feeling of loneliness lately… and what I’m realizing is that, contrary to what is natural, the cure for loneliness is actually to give up more. Go help someone else for a second. Go serve. Do something to get your mind off of yourself. Self-centeredness is a vaccum because in and of ourselves we will never be satisfied, and the only cure is to battle and defeat the idea of self altogether.

I Chicago I sat down to be thankful for everything. I wanted to change my perspective because I felt burdened all my responsibilities. I was in a time where I was losing perspective and feeling burnt out on everything. I was losing that thankful feeling. But as I thought about everyone in my life, I was filled with this feeling of understanding and forgiveness… I’m letting go of the idea of an “enemy…” cause in the end the real enemy lives a lot closer to you than you think.