This summer has been such a wonderful liberating time for me providing me with the space to really review and reaffirm my own dreams and recipe for happiness.
After the pressure of four years of academic work and my current “all-but-dissertation” status – I started the summer under the effects of a pretty heavy and unrelenting internal taskmaster. I wasn’t having much fun, I felt lethargic and certainly wasn’t getting much work done on my dissertation. I knew something needed to free itself, I just didn’t know how or what.
And then I received an unexpected gift – a European coffee maker.
I’m actually not a huge coffee fanatic. In fact, while I love the extra turbo gear it puts me in (I’m an Aries after all) my body really doesn’t like coffee at all – and it’s made that perfectly clear over the years.
So my joy wasn’t about the coffee. It’s what the familiar aluminum shape and the warm cup of coffee wanted me to remember:
Back in 1996, I spent my junior year abroad in southern Spain in the town of Granada – it was one of the best years of my life. That year I left behind the pressures of academia, the family ties and disappointments – I took a sabbatical from my identity and found I was much more than I thought I was. (more…)