Routines.

For a Virgo, I'm surprisingly spontaneous. My kids and I take a lot of day trips just because I woke up and decided I didn't want to stay home. Was it last week that we went to Millennium Park? We've gone there, the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois Beach State Park. Smaller excursions have been to IKEA where we pretend that those rooms are our actual home, and one rainy day we drove to Woodfield Mall (which is something of a creature) and randomly decided to get MG's ears pierced. Yesterday we went to the dunes. Unplanned. And it was awesome. Although the traffic about killed us all. Still, it was great to just pack a bag and bust a move to the beach, spend the day in the sun and sand and surf. Life is so tedious if you let it be. Get up, have breakfast, go to work/school, do the day thing, come home, eat dinner, watch tv or read a book, go to bed.

I think we establish routines in order to keep ourselves so busy we don't have time to think about how unhappy we are in our lives. We build our own constraints.

I did it for a lot of years, was so buried in what I thought my life should look like, this Martha Stewart-inspired and picture-perfect contrived vision. Illusion. God, I was so uptight. And unhappy. I'll never go there again. Life is gray. It has frayed edges. It is worn in and loved. It is lived, not survived. It's taking a day off to read a book start to finish, building an obstacle course in the backyard, eating lunch picnic-style on the living room floor. It's choosing not to make your job your definition, finding your passions and letting them drive you, choosing to make your dream a reality. Recognizing the infinite possibilities. Because they are infinite.

Listening to: Band Of Horses, thinking of The Velveteen Rabbit

xo. kb.