And the hardest part / Was letting go, not taking part / Was the hardest part

I'm a believer that some of the most profound life-changing lessons come in the form of the most mundane experiences.

When I was in high school, I wrote a college essay about the profound experience of shopping for back-to-school clothes. In my mind, that annual family experience captured my family's dynamic, our socio-economic conditions, some of my culturally-infused values, and most importantly, a major life lesson I had come to learn throughout the course of my childhood.

To summarize, in my family, shopping is a bit of a sacred tradition. We were never rich enough to buy new things all the time, so my parents made it a point to avoid the shopping malls altogether. So, when we did go shopping, it was always an experience. We would wake up extra early, get showered and properly dressed (my mom always wore her nicer clothes, my dad would be in khakis and a button-up shirt), and we would spend the day indulging ourselves in material items that we would never be able to afford throughout the year. My brother and I would load up on new clothes for the upcoming school year. We were fortunate to live in Southern California, where the weather stayed pretty consistent and different clothes weren't really needed for different seasons.

Buying clothes would always be a struggle for me, because I was always extremely underweight for my age. Pants would fit around the waist, but would be too short at the ankle. Dresses were a no-go, because I would swim in them. It would be embarrassing to ask for a size '8' when I was actually 12 years old. I would only be able to afford a few select "cool" articles of clothing, because that's all we could really afford. Shopping, as exciting as a family event it was, always left me a little dejected by the time I got home, because nothing would fit quite the way that they should.
It took me years before I could come to accept my body for what it is. I'm still a little too thin, a little too lanky, and extremely flat-chested. But over the years, I learned to find what works for my body, rather than trying to fit my body to what's popular. Finally realizing that I didn't have to wear what everyone else was wearing was one of those profound life lessons about learning to accept and be happy with who I am.

The mundane, yet profound, life lesson I thought of today has to do with my hair. Walking into the office, a colleague noted that my hair looked particularly pretty put up. I had tied my hair up to eat my lunch, without putting much thought into it. I know though that if I try to mimic this hair again, it'll never happen. My hair is just funny like that-- if I try to make it do anything, it just doesn't work. I realized that life is like that too. Planning for it sometimes doesn't do very much. Just trying something, without thinking about it, yields great, unexpected results.


Given this view of the world, I am prone to think a lot about every little interaction and situation, trying to determine if there was a greater lesson to be derived from it. I guess this is what makes me such a serious person most of the time... I'm always thinking and reflecting about life's that has already happened. I figure at some point I'm going to have to let this little obsession go and just let life be, but for now, it's fun to think that everything connects to everything else...