Towards Paris

Paris is really only 47 days away. I know it has been creeping up on me and I know I'm going. Yet, I've been feeling incredibly oblivious about it. So much so that once the basic elements were secured - approval from boss, apartment, and ticket - I feel like it just became this suspended thing. Spending a month in Paris was such a fixation for many months (and really, a lifetime!) and my mind was buzzing with how to make it work. The ambition behind that fixation brought about a great investment of energy - planning, buying books and Paris related items, working on my French language lessons, etc.

I was buying up little tokens of Paris, like my beautiful Paris charm necklaces, Paris magnets, the very hip Moleskin City Notebook Paris, the neat little package of Paris City Walks, and so much more. I was eagerly engaged in my Rosetta Stone lessons, watching French in Action episodes and actually using French phrases and words in emails and conversations with friends. I was voraciously stuffing my Netflix queue with French films, reading Balzac, Voltaire and Flaubert as though French literature was the only thing to ever exist.

Yet, somehow, once those fundamental commitments were made with work, apartment, and airfare, that energy subsided substantially. My French Phrase-A-Day calendar is sitting over there on the shelf, still on some date in March. That great Moleskin planner has just a few places of interest written in it (Ladurée, Vaux le Vicomte, Museé Carnavalet, Museé Rodin, and Belle Hortense bookshop), and I even started a Towards Paris blog but the inspiration for such has waned considerably. Although I feel that there is much to write about where this upcoming trip is concerned, I sit down to blog about it and the words just aren't there.

Earlier this week I had an awful feeling that my seeming lack of interest in Paris meant that I wasn't truly thrilled about this upcoming trip. I feared that maybe my previously held conviction about Paris being a gateway to a fuller life was somehow false. And then, just as instantly as this last and painful thought emerged, I became acutely aware of a recurring theme in my dreams... baggage. I've had countless dreams about baggage. In many of the dreams, I suddenly realize that I am responsible for all of this luggage around me, that I somehow have to lug all of these bags around and realistically, not one person could carry so much on their own. Or dreams of packing and repacking to an unnecessary degree for a trip I never actually embark on within the dream because I'm spending an insane amount of time packing.

In thinking about this symbol within my dreams, the "aha" moment came. I realize that once I made the commitment to myself to spend a month in Paris and actually spoke with my boss, booked the apartment, and received the airline miles from my sister, I was off the hook with myself, so to speak. I didn't feel some ridiculous urgency to spend all my free time learning the French language and consuming all things French because I know I'm going to be living it. And that's not to say that learning French or reading about France has ever been a chore, but I think that much of my energy spent steeped in such was a substitute effort to quench my desire.

So often in life, I've over-prepared for things that I've never carried out. And in investing so much energy in the planning and preparing, I feel that I (we?) sub-consciously attempt to substitute for the actual experience. Maybe it is a kind of fear that prevents us from really living out the experience, embarking on the actual journey. Whatever it is, somehow we manage to keep our dream barely alive by surrounding ourselves with knowledge and "souvenirs" of a journey we may never actually take. Really, trying to keep that dream barely alive is far more exhausting than carrying out the dream.

Once I committed to this month in Paris, I felt a tremendous easiness about my dreams of Paris. I know that I'm absolutely open to the experience and I don't feel some enormous pressure to be "prepared." I'm not trying to control the experience and I've not set any expectations on the trip, which is wonderful. Just committing to this trip has already put me closer to that symbolic gateway. And yes, with it (as demonstrated in my previous post) a divine discontent. That sensation of being alive started invading every aspect of my psyche. If I can commit to this month in Paris, what else am I willing to do with my life?

It seems ridiculous at times, thinking that we might be afraid to pursue what seems like a simple and relatively easy dream such as spending a month in Paris. Yet, we deny ourselves our dreams so often and so aggressively. Why is that? Possibly because that consciousness makes us feel so much and urges us to action?

In thinking about posting this last night, I felt a resurgence of interest in my French language lessons and much delight in glimpses of the upcoming month in Paris. But this feeling was a new one, an easy one. I'm really going. And now, after allowing myself these past couple months of suspending that energy, I feel revitalized. My French books and trinkets look different. They feel real. And suddenly, so do I.