Hi there!

Greetings, Universe.

Sometimes — no, no; oftentimes, if you're like 30-Year-Old Me — it is far too easy to get swept up in the rush of here and now with deadlines and bills and appointments and disappointments. It's easy to miss the moment that's actually happening in wondering and worrying about and planning for a dozen or more different possible futures, with part of that planning being a fear of repeating not-so-fun mistakes of the past. You know the routines. You know the hopes. You know the compromises.

You know the feeling that comes with that frozen moment when you wonder where the day went, what you did with your time, and why you didn't take an extra five minutes to yourself to simply stop and be, and so do I.

30-Year-Old Me is the Queen of Deadlines, the Empress of Multitasking, the Duchess of Adding One More Thing to The Schedule. She's fast. She's organized (most days). She's reliable. She's a perfectionist and a nit-picker and has learned to enjoy eating her lunch at her desk, because that makes the non-regular work-breaks so much nicer (that's why I do that, right?)

30-Year-Old-Me's body finally caught up with her, and said, simply, "Knock it off." How? Heart palpitations. Arrhythmia, and supposedly harmless (so far) but most definitely stress-related. So 30-Year-Old-Me stopped and listened ...

Hi. My name is Sketch and I'm a dreamer stuck in a workaholic's body. I'm 30 years old, I'm working full time while going to school working on my Master's degree, and even when I'm at home, on the weekend, with nothing pressing to worry about, I worry anyway. I plan out the next day's work loads before I even know how heavy or light certain tasks will be. I plan out my breakfast and lunch while sleepless at 2:30 a.m. (I juice and blend fresh fruits and veggies for two meals a day and then get back to my meat-and-potatoes roots for dinner). I plan out potential bill-paying plans, none of which ever play out like they really should. Heck, I'm even guilty of planning out my leisure time — what book I'm going to read, what game I'm going to play, what movie to watch, etcetera.

It's kind of gross, really. I've known for a long time that I need to slow down, take each task and worry moment by moment and actually live in the here-and-now. I know that large amounts of my life have flown and are flying by without my acknowledgement, and I know that means that the perfect future I tell myself I'm striving for will never arrive, because I won't recognize its achievement if I'm always thinking about how much better or worse things could be.

So now I'm finally doing what I've wanted to do for years, but of course, being me, put off for "sometime when things settle down and I'm in the right mind frame." Turns out I have to put myself in that mind frame and make that "sometime" be now. So, now, here I am and here we are.

I'm Buddhist, or trying to be. I believe it was the Dalai Lama who said, "If you think you are Buddhist, you are not. If you think you are not Buddhist, you are." So, I thought I was, but that means I'm not, which makes me think I'm not, which means I am. And I think I like that.

So, I've been seeking mentors, everyday heroes, more mundane versions of the Buddha or the Dalai Lama in the people in my life. This is both a new revelation and something I think I've always known but not expressed. I'm lucky enough to have a sort of adopted-Buddha-Grampa in a cherished co-worker, and a more down-to-earth, gritty, reality guru in my fiancé. For a long time I wondered why that wasn't enough, but now I get it. It's that whole "believe in yourself or no one else will" thing. I kept looking to external forces to guide me, and while that's all well and good, it cannot be the base of a person's personality and functionality. I needed to find the guide in myself.

And, although I've made light with her in past blogs, I finally realized that guide is Six-Year-Old Me.

When I was six years old, the world was, for lack of a better word, awesome. Literally — everything carried with it some sense of awe, of wonder, of thrill — whether it was good, bad, weird, or mundane (by grown-up standards, of course). When I was six I could go outside after a good rain and find whole worlds in the moss-lined cracks and pits in the asphalt that now contained their own lakes, complete with the occasional drowning or drowned ant, or pale, slowly thrashing worm that was, of course, actually a sea serpent haunting that lake.

I had no real worries, but not because there was nothing to worry about (according to my mother, I have always been a worrier, even when I was too young to properly pronounce the word but tried to anyway). Rather, with a faith that must have known something I've since forgotten, I knew that eveything would be OK, somehow. I didn't know how it would all work out, I just knew it would because it always did.

That's something I forgot a very, very long time ago, but even to this day, it's held true.

Six-Year-Old Me was pretty smart, it turns out. So now I'm forcing myself to slow down and take the time to think about how I would have handled the things I face in my adult life if I had to face them at six. Six-Year-Old Me is my guide — my little, tow-headed, blue-eyed Buddha, my Better Me. I think she's got a big job ahead of her in convincing me to let go of my adult, knee-jerk reactions and worries and schedules and plans. I think she may want to throw the classic tantrum now and then. But then, so does 30-Year-Old Me, so I guess that's understandable.

I am going to reflect more on life and how it can be lived, rather than a dream and how it should be planned. I'm going to use this blog to chronicle it. I think Six-Year-Old Me is up to the task.

Am I?