Price Check

I wish I were taller. Not in a literal sense, really, but just in the context of my newfound metaphor for goals and ambitions. And grocery stores.

But let me back up for a moment and explain that last bit, because I realize it’s pretty dang random. It’s just that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking (more like overthinking, as per usual, har har), and it didn’t really hit me until recently why it is that I’ve been so perturbed and unable to focus so much of this year. It’s not because I lack motivation. It’s not that I have too much on my plate. It’s because I just really haven’t sat down and thought about the concrete possibilities of my future until now – avoiding stress has become my new favourite pastime, and as a result, I’ve also put off some serious self-reflection and writing that might just bring me back on track.

I've spent the last four years of my life shopping. Shopping for purpose, direction, inspiration, knowledge. Brain food and stimulating conversations in aisle two. Wasted afternoons, aisle eight. Relationships and hurt feelings, aisle five.

My fellow shoppers peruse row upon row of goods, canned emotions and life-altering bags of fluff. Prepackaged boxes of collegiate life - sororities, fraternities, culture clubs, team sports - line the most popular aisles, and everyone wrestles to get the cleanest, least beat-up of the bunch. Name brands are pretty key here - you get what you pay for, after all.

In the quieter aisles are the ingredients, the put-me-together pieces of the college experience. It’ll take more effort to create a dish from scratch, and though there’s no guarantee that the final concoction will be anything worth devouring, venturing into these aisles at least means that the shopper is taking some form of risk. It takes confidence and a little bit of naivety to believe that what he or she can come up with will be worth the effort.

Cooking is love, and love is cooking.

And to cook without passion is worse than not cooking at all.

We pick up pieces of familiarity and pair it with something daring and new. Pasta and chili. Chicken and homemade pesto. Eggs and vegetables and salsa so hot your mouth will burn. New recipes and spontaneous creations. We hope that one of the strange concoctions we come up with will stick, will be a success that we can recreate and tweak and foster into something greater later on down the line.

But what about those hard-to-reach items at the tops of the shelves? The ingredients and the pieces that just might be what our recipes need for that extra pop of flavor?

What if we just don’t know they’re there?

I wish I were taller because sometimes I feel as though what I’m looking for is hidden in the back of the very top shelf – behind the stale box of donuts and the dust-ridden can of soup. What I’m hoping will make or break my latest venture is tucked away on a wayward shelf, but it’s just not visible to me because I don’t know to look there.

So I settle for less, making the best I know how from what items I see available to me. I can improvise and make something truly unique, a signature dish that’ll stand on its own delicious merit at potlucks. But eventually, even that becomes safe.

It’s just that now, I’m curious.

I want to see what’s at the top and how I can use those forgotten items in my ultimate recipe for success. The reason why these pieces are at the top is because they’ve been there the longest; they’ve had the longest shelf life. How can I tap into those resources and use them to create something better? Bolder?

All my interests from days long gone are starting to reappear the closer I get to graduation, to that checkout line. I want to write. I want to listen. I want to learn. I want to see what I’ve tossed out of my life that just might have been the one thing that makes the entire mixture work.

What am I missing?

Somewhere in my four years of shopping I’ve come up with a grocery list of items that work for me, but now it’s time to try something new.

I’m peering back into my past to see how I can create a better future. I need a ladder.