Sepiatone loving

I've been spending a good part of my three-month work hiatus at home in LA with family, and more recently, in Taiwan with the extended family. Even through college, getting to spend this much time with fam was such a rarity, and what I was mostly able to salvage through those years were only bits and pieces of a larger picture. So I've considered these last few weeks a real treat in terms of quality down-time with the people who know me best.

Admittedly, being out in New York and away from my immediate family hasn't always been the easiest thing. On the surface, I embrace the independence and freedom that the city has to offer -- but it's both a blessing and a curse to be so easily accessible to everyone and everything in the vicinity. I'm lucky to even be able to experience life on a different coast, I know, to pursue my passions at a time when practicality might seem the better path.

But realistically, the pace of life can be pretty dang draining. I put myself on a two-week communication silence while I was in Taiwan, and I feel like I learned so much more and used my time so much more efficiently not being bound to the tether of technology. No email, no Internet, no Facebook, no phone. I spent more time living in the real "now" than in the demands of a contrived "now" made up of updates and Tweets and email counters. I wasn't running to catch up all the time; I could set my own pace.

Rather than living vicariously through other people in other time zones, I was actually taking part in my own life and really getting to see beyond the distraction of the Crackberry screen.

It was refreshing.

I've always said that health and family are the only two things that anybody needs. Everything else is extraneous and will fall into place somehow. My entire family made this trip back to Taiwan because my grandfather recently passed away, and in those two weeks, nothing else really mattered. I knew the job hunt would still be here when I got back. The emails, they would pile up. But nobody needed to get to me so urgently that it couldn't wait two weeks while I spent time with family.

My grandfather was 100 years old when he passed. He'd gone from living in the countryside to training to be a physician to being a surgeon to being a husband, father and grandfather. That's a lot of years of life. That's a lot of life in his years. But I don't think he ever would have (nor would anyone in his life) defined himself by just any one of those labels. He was human, and therefore multifaceted, and I think being there at the funeral really caused me to think a lot about mortality and death and, truth be told, life.

I titled this blog "quarter-life musings of a life in transition," and taken literally, that means I'm already (almost) a quarter of the way through with this thing called life. It's pretty terrifying, really. It's not that this means I have the sudden urge to grow up, necessarily, only that I'm more conscious of my thoughts and actions now, and how it'll all make for a projected "later."

The crazy thing is that the people that I've surrounded myself with now are the ones who'll be able to help piece together the bits of my life later on down the line. They're the ones I'll be reminiscing with and sharing memories with and the ones who'll become characters and names in the story I call my life. And these things I'm doing now, they're all leading to a big unexpected place called "the future," and as unpredictable as that place might be, I've got to pay better attention to the now in order to trace back my deliberate steps to wherever I end up.

Hearing so many stories about my grandfather, learning about the intricacies of the family -- politics and history and all that -- is inspiring. I don't think I'm alone when I say that I want to live a life worth telling about. And so I begin. Now.