Burning candles and growing up: realizations had while weeding

Realization 1.
I suppose this little realization is ordinary and understood by many, but for me it came as rather a surprise. Maybe because I have been living for only a little while, and only really thoroughly living with presence for much less than that. I am still thrilled by the recent novelty of talking to people, playing with color, feeling confidence and a little boldness.

My realization was about Transferability. When I was living near Seattle my time was cultivating new experience and pushing myself to get the most of Being Far From Home, packing my weekends full of dancing, meeting people, bicycle rides on the islands, and then Sunday serenely playing pipe organ usually after sleeping in a slightly compromised situation (friend's couch or church basement) but taking energy from that and powering onward. My Mom calls this Burning the Candle at Both Ends, and I call it All The More Flame Thank You.

I thought this rich living of a life for me was Seattle itself: the public transportation to anywhere, the outgoing people, the mountains, the celebration of expression and strangeness. But I learned the other weekend that it might not be Seattle, but that it might be something actually transferable.

In Rochester: Dancing, bicycle riding, IPA-ing, crashing a party, then sleeping in a corner of what was essentially a construction site (the house of a friend dear enough I could ask to crash there, even though it was undergoing remodeling so thorough the inside was unrecognizable). The next morning brushing off residual wood dust and setting out for my church organ job and stopping for coffee--not at one of the dozens of Seattle local roasters, but at the Square One Diner in rural NY ignoring the questionable slick of sheen on the coffee--driving my car--not dozing off over a New Yorker in a choice bus seat. But unlike Novelty Distant Washington, here, thanks to the gift of proximity, my parents filed in as pew audience. As did Mr. New Bicycle Boy. I didn't invite anybody; they just showed up on their own agenda and this pleased me in that warming and dearly supportive way. Even here I still feel like the, no doubt strange, "purple haired lady" (according to Little Mr. Four-year-old at my Tacoma church), eating a second breakfast out in the church yard, poking focusedly about for 4-leaf clovers.

Realization 2.
Another realization I had--this came while weeding around some cabbages--was about Growing Up. I've been pondering lately, When Is One Grown-up? I've almost 27 now and I haven't felt the phase change I was expecting and by now it has been most certainly due. "Grown-up" I thought was where you are very good to remember to take out the trash, you make measurably more money than you did as a teenager, you understand things like taxes and car insurance, that maybe even you are a little dull and predictable. Or maybe it meant having a dog, having more than one piece of furniture to call your own, being settled with a partner.

But maybe not. I realized within the past couple years ago I began to have a sense of style (personal style mind you, not conforming to a magazine's proven aesthetic one, but simply my own), that I was beginning to know how to easily talk to people, how to make a decision balanced and carefully, how to express complicated thoughts, how to make people laugh, and how to take care of myself to be happy and healthy. This feels not so much the caricature of the "grown up" responsible and dowdy, but more like a Growing Into. Splitting at the seams of potential--growing into them--and feeling pretty good about it. 

So I think I'm growing into now. And it's pretty great.