Are you overwhelmed, stressed, frazzled? Do you feel like you simply have TOO MUCH going on in your life, all the time? Constant distractions, things pulling you in different directions, you’re disorganized and absolutely ready to throw in the towel and take time off. Here’s seven things you can do right now to unclutter your life; it may not solve all your problems, but I’ll be darned if it doesn’t help at least a little.
Author: melissaburgess
33. Buffalonian. Loves hockey, writing, traveling & more.
The Power of Time
Do you ever stop and think about how much time can do? It’s so incredibly powerful. Time can throw your life into a completely different direction, or it can change nothing. Sometimes, time can bring you back to where you were a period of time ago, whether in the same circumstances or different. Time can bring people back into your life who you thought you’d lost touch with ages ago; it can also take people out of your life that you imagined would always be there. Time can heal wounds, but it can also create new ones. Times can give you the power to do whatever you want to accomplish.
History Can Be a Wonderful Thing
I live in an area that is just barely outside the city limits of Buffalo, New York. For all intents & purposes, I’m a resident of the city, even if technically I’m not. I work in the heart of downtown Buffalo, I commute via bus on a daily basis and I’m always out and about venturing around the city.
My daily bus commute to work downtown involves an approximately four-mile stretch of Broadway Street, including going through a community that was once a very Polish area back in the day. Now, it’s filled with many vacant buildings, the infamous Broadway Market and a couple of businesses here and there that still manage to exist.
Yesterday, I came across a website that lists a number of historic buildings in the city of Buffalo. It includes a list of buildings that are considered “at risk,” some that have been lost and others that have been saved. It’s a pretty interesting website. You can view the listings by zip code which allows you to kind of piece things together and look at specific portions of the city, if that’s what you’re trying to do.
A number of listings I found were interesting. Some noted that the building used to be a bank many, many years ago; others noted famous stores, meeting places, etc.
But there was one listing that really caught my eye.
The Joys of Vacation
For the past few days, I went away on a little vacation to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is somewhere I’ve been going on vacations since I was very young, since I have family who lives there. In the recent years, I began visiting on solo trips, sometimes for specific events (ie., hockey games) and sometimes just.. because. My trip this time really got me thinking about things – mainly, the joys of being somewhere and what it all means.
“Strangers”
As children, we’re told by our parents not to talk to strangers. While I completely understand this sentiment when we’re children, as adults…… there has to be a point where this ‘rule’ breaks. Why? Because everyone is a stranger until they aren’t. Until you give them a chance, make a connection. Everyone is a stranger until you form a bond, create something, and go on to develop a relationship – platonic, work, romantic, or whatever – from there.
If you’re never willing to give anyone a chance, you will never meet anyone new. You’ll never make any friends or acquaintances, you’ll never find a romance or anything like that. You have to be willing to bend a little, trust people until they prove themselves not trustworthy, and take the leap into the unknown with someone who is, at the time, a stranger to you.
It’s incredible how, once you give someone that chance, the relationship can develop. My friend and I were talking about this the other day; how you can go from barely knowing anyone except in passing, to telling them all of your secrets. How you can go from speaking once to eventually reaching a comfort level where you’re willing to travel with them, stay at their house, let them into YOUR home, etc. It might take days to become a little less than strangers; it might only take hours, or it might take weeks, or months, or even years. But gradually, we find ourselves no longer strangers, but something more, and I think that’s just incredible to think about.
If you think about it, everyone begins as strangers until SOMETHING brings us together. It might be a common interest – hockey, reading, knitting, whatever. It might be a place – a chance meeting at a cafe, or a run-in in the supermarket. It might be from work, or through friends or family, or some other way. But there’s something that brings you together, that takes away the first layer of “stranger”-ness, that opens things to a whole new world of possibilities.
A year ago, I’d barely ever spoken to the person I now consider one of my very good friends. We’d spoken a handful of times via the Internet, but had never met in person. Less than a year later, we have this connection, this sense of trust and honesty and so many memories we’ve formed in this short span of time. We’ve gone from strangers to something completely different and it’s pretty amazing to think about the development of this relationship; the character development, the relationship development……. it’s amazing how people can go from being strangers to something else, and all it requires is giving it a chance.
thoughts of Melissa 