Seeking Simplicity


It's almost been a month since Frog and I came back from Iceland and although I managed to edit these photos in one day, it took me a whole month to think about what to write for this blog post. For a while I've been struggling to put my personal thoughts and emotions down on paper. Whenever I tried to type something up, I'd feel the sentence storms in my head swirling and the wind of words gushing incoherent phrases. I felt as if I had to create a "MUST-see-sights" or "Top 5 things to do in Iceland" list when all I wanted to talk about are my feelings. A simple google search will yield much better advice and Top 10 lists than my humble brain can ever come up with so here we go, mushy feelings it is. 

At the end of August, Frog and I hopped on the plane with a small backpack and spent 5 amazing days visiting Reykjavik and driving along Iceland's scenic southern coast. It felt so liberating to carry so little and so empowering to know that the most important "things" were right next to you. I've talked about minimalism in the past and I've been trying to implement this philosophy in my life with a lot of trial and error. One area that I struggle the most is simplifying my commitments.  I jam packed my summer with work, studies, overtime and photography projects because I wanted to make big leaps toward my goals. I knew I had a limit so I cut out a lot of personal time for myself and friends. I wanted to tick boxes off my list and even better if they were ticked off simultaneously. Sometimes I felt like I was two people: one person who's sprinting like mad to reach her fuzzy dreams and another person that was sitting on the sidelines, observing. I felt an internal shift inside of me but I didn't have time to catch up to myself to find out who this new person was. Thus this trip was as if someone hit the brakes abruptly and told me to get out of the car and find a slower car. We had a lot of idle time on the road and broad spaces to breathe, absorb and process things instead of just rushing from one destination to the other. The places we visited felt more meaningful and the memories more vivid.    When we came back, I jumped straight back into my workaholic routine. Your girl never learns does she *wink*?  Tonight I wanted to pull myself back into the headspace that I had while we were on the road with these images from Reykjavik. The simplicity of it all: just one destination at a time.



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