I am in the habit of only putting up blog posts that are press release style, with a positive spin and a lesson learned. This is mostly how I live my life, especially when I’m in the zone. But I’m not always in the zone, sometimes life comes at me faster than I can take it and it feels like I barely have time to breathe. That’s hard for me right now, especially after being in Mongolia for a year. There I can breathe, look around, smile and then breathe some more.

I tried to hit the ground running here in America, with a full itinerary (maybe busting at the seams, as Carrie so eloquently put it) and a lot of people I wanted to visit with and hug. I tried not to fill my schedule with too much, just a few highlights. But even so it has still felt like a lot to me. I still can’t tell if that means I need to step it up and get better at doing more things in a day or slow it down and just take on less each day. In Mongolia I do very few things each day and I am able to put a lot of focus and care into each of them. Things are grouped into hours usually, an hour for lunch here, an hour for class there, an hour for a meeting, an hour for working out and so on. This makes it easy to keep track of things and makes for a very relaxed lifestyle. If the length of our lives were all equal in the number of heartbeats, I think Mongolians would live longer because their hearts have calmer, slowly beats on a regular basis. We live fast in America that’s for sure, but I think that increased heart rate of ours might cost us in the end. I feel like it’s just all a bit too much too fast.

Henry David Thoreau said, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.” I think I agree with him.