Window Seat

Perfect star alignment allowed for Josh and I to recently have conferences in Las Vegas at the exact. same. time. So, Monday we went off for a (very) short adventure in the city that never sleeps (although we really did).

Las Vegas (Lost Wages) ahhhh….suck in your stale cigarette air while you can. (You can still smoke there everywhere and it is SO WEIRD. Your walking around a MALL and people are smoking. I was like a Communist dictator wagging my finger at them.) On this trip, I had a great opportunity to be by myself for quite a spell of time while "working" there. I had the chance to spend an afternoon walking around the largest photography expo in the US (read: kid in a candy store) and then to walk the entire strip. I was in Vegas 10 years ago (bachelorette party) and 10 years before that (immediately after college) and it was very interesting for me to allow myself to reflect on the changes in those different span of years.

What a crazy girl I was to jot off to places like Vegas for just a couple days. Unlike now where I preplan every detail, those trips were a backpack and the right pair of shoes. I didn't have an iPhone to tell me if I was turning on the wrong road, I just figured it out.

All this thinking, with its intense inner dialogue, the outward, intense focus on my work, and missing my littles so much (after just 48 hours away) really took a toll on my brain and heart. I got on to the plane a bit drained and somehow deflated.

Thanks to Southwest's "cattle call" seating, I got a spot for my ride home in the middle of two others. Awkward as it was, I could stop leaning over the grandmotherly type sitting next to me holding the window seat. She was nice and polite, but never took her eyes off her Sudoku puzzle, then book, then the magazine in front of her. I was partially annoyed and partially confused. Here was the sun setting in the most glorious way on the Sierra Nevadas just out her little porthole to the world, and she never stopped busying herself with stupid tasks in her hands.

I thought back to the 60 minutes before I left to catch my plane to Vegas and how I furiously was trying to get some photography albums done and sent instead of just sitting on the floor with the kids. I thought about how I have been so consumed with all this work for church (finding our new preacher) that I definitely have let things slide around the house. I thought about how I get way to caught up on social media to just look outside more.

And I realized that I had changed a lot from the Heathers who had been to Vegas 10 and 20 years ago. While the more mature and sedate side of me had viewed those trips as impetuous and daring, they were definitely examples of the Heather who was living in the moment, who was looking outside the window, and not the Heather who was way too busy with just the tasks in front of her. For the past couple years I have been very busy, but mostly surviving. Motherhood does that to you, but we also do it to ourselves.

Things are about to get crazy around here. I am moving into the window seat.