You’ve gotta enjoy the little things.

Hello everyone. Welcome to my existential crisis blog post.

Coming to a new place means more than just a change of scenery. So many aspects of my life have been thrown into complete disarray. Where once I scheduled my dinner like clockwork, now I eat baguettes everyday like a madman. Notice the plural noun in that last bit. So anyways, there’s a lot of difference in my life now from back home, which has led me to do some interesting thoughts. The habits that I held at home that felt so important have become irrelevant, whereas new daily rituals such as tea drinking have become integral to my daily life. These changes wouldn’t seem life-changing to an outsider- yet they actually displace all the things about your life that you take for granted. I’ve found the experience of changing these daily routines to be exhilarating in some ways. In these times when the nature of your life is turned upside down, you get the chance to redefine yourself. Surrounded by so many passionate and creative individuals, I find myself frequently trying to improve the quality of my work or my intentionality to meet the standards of such a talented group of people. The different time zones mean that I can’t communicate with the friends I’ve made back home, and they all have their own adventures to be on. Even the weekly television releases (or more pertinently to me, weekly podcasts and media) come out at different times, and so my weekly rituals of anticipation and excitement are undercut. Rather than wallowing in these changes, there’s a great opportunity to see the ritual in your life and say, ‘wait a minute, no, I don’t need this. I can be a version of myself in Oxford that doesn’t have to be a carbon-copy of myself in Colorado, just as my collegiate Colorado persona doesn’t have to be the same as my California self’. Probably most people wouldn’t find this train of thought revolutionary, but for me the difference in the little things all add up. Seeing different faces every day, realizing that the people you see on a daily basis live on the other side of the world from the places you know, can lead you to feel very, very small. To quote my one true hero, Tallahassee from the hit film Zombieland, “You’ve gotta enjoy the little things”. Thank you for listening. I hope this causes you to have a little existential crisis of your own <3. Perhaps a picture of an excellent day of class in a crazy church or my next-level tea spread will help.