Present Over Perfect

good people, with good opinions. You were made by hand
with great love by the God of the universe, and he planted
deep inside of you a set of loves and dreams and
idiosyncrasies, and you can ignore them as long as you
want, but they will at some point start yelling. Worse than
that, if you ignore them long enough, they will go silent,
and that’s the real tragedy.
What’s changing everything for me is a new
understanding that we get to decide how we want to live.
We get to shape our days and our weeks, and if we don’t,
they’ll get shaped by the wide catch-all of “normal” and
“typical,” and who wants that?
You can live on a farm or out of a backpack. You can
work from your kitchen or in a high-rise. You can worship
in your living room or a cathedral. Isn’t that beautiful? And
exciting? And so full of freedom?
You can wear slippers or heels, eat steak or kale, read
poetry or spreadsheets, fall asleep to the hum of the city or
out under the stars. You get to make your life. In fact, you
have to. And not only can you make it, you can remake it.
So many of the people I admire most have lived several
lives: My favorite college professor spent a couple decades
in a beach town and now lives a positively city life. My
friends Tsh and Kyle and their three kids just traveled
around the world for a year. Blaine, an actor and a maker
who’s lived like a gypsy for years, just bought a house in
our neighborhood with his wife Margaret and their darling
girls Ruby and Eloise, and this long-time wanderer is