Month: January 2019

Life In-Between: Waiting to Live

Audra Edmonson2 Comments

I recently read a book called ‘The In-Between’ by Jeff Goins. It’s an anecdotal book for the most part, full of memories and small stories that illustrate his major point; that we spend most of our time waiting. Seriously. In fact as well as in our heads. We spend more time than we think in lines, on hold, in our cars traveling; always waiting for something. We also spend an inordinate amount of time waiting in our heads and hearts – waiting for the next thing to happen to us. For graduation, marriage, kids, retirement, death…and everything in between.

We spend so much time waiting for the next day or next whatever that we rarely find time to live in the moment. Sure, living in the moment has some bad connotations, like being flighty and irresponsible and never having a plan for the future, but most of us aren’t like that. We may occasionally let ourselves go in the moment when we’re having fun with friends or doing something we love, but those moments are like bright stars in the dark sky – small and minor compared to the vastness of life.

In Goins’ book, he talks about learning to appreciate the small things. Trite advice, you think. Perhaps. But true nevertheless. Look back at the past week or so and think about when you were happiest. Was it a grand moment full of importance and splendor? Or was it a small thing that simply made you very happy? If I do this, I think of being with my friends. Or finishing a book series. Or seeing my word count go up on my book.

All these are small things, but it’s these that I remember.

I’ve spent my entire life in the purgatory of waiting. I felt like my life wouldn’t begin until college, or then until I moved to Korea, or now until I’ve published my first book or gotten married or had a child… But it’s not true. Life is not a goal, it’s a state of being. I am alive now. I’m living, no matter what I’m doing. Waiting to live doesn’t even make sense. Neither does regretting something. I’ve regretted a few things. I always feel guilty that I’m not already married, that I haven’t already got an amazing, six-figure job or traveled more. But looking back, every single experience I’ve had has made me grow in a way that wouldn’t have happened in any other circumstance. I’ve needed all those waiting bits and periods in order to become what I am now, and all the waiting bits ahead will be necessary to get me further. I’m not the person I want to be, so I need a lot more waiting. I now appreciate the waiting, as time to reflect and grow. For, as Goins says, it’s frequently in those waiting moments that we do grow. We think, we reason, we imagine and learn within ourselves, often in a split-second.

I think we tend to hate the waiting and feel it’s useless because we often escape into books or movies, worlds in which no one ever waits for long and things happen consecutively. Action is frequent, speech is parsed down and simplified to exclude the nonessentials. We want life to happen like that, but it won’t. Imagine a book that actually followed, moment by moment, real life. It would be unutterably dull.

So we need to stop and consciously observe the waiting time and learn to grow in it. Reflect more, learn more, think more, appreciate more, and be grateful for the small things. We all live in-between the big things, and that’s where most of life happens.

Remembering Korea: Paldang Dam in Fall

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Fall Berries

The beautiful park near the dam; definitely the best picture, which is probably why I put it first.

I’ve been remembering Korea a lot lately, and I found this old post from an old blog and thought I’d share. You know, for old time’s sake. So please enjoy this post I wrote just after traveling to Paldang Dam.

When I have fun, I really have fun. Fall here is incredible. Coming from Texas, whose version of fall tends to be, “Hey, it’s November! Time to bring the temps all the way down to 80 and kill the trees! Whoooo!” having any kind of transition to winter is a treat. I never knew what fall was. Here, I call it Autumn, because holy pancakes, Batman, the colors and weather are sublime.

I feel like Anne of Green Gables, with the shining waters, warm reds of Octobers, and now the promise of a chilly, mystical November. Perfect for my writing and tea-drinking desires.

In honor of the season, my friend and I went biking by the Paldang Dam, about an hour outside of Seoul. You can rent bikes there cheap; 10,000won ($10) for the day. We got the cute ones with baskets and trundled off. Now, my friend is a marathoner, so she probably considered our five-hour outing a light jaunt. My sedentary thighs were not so happy, but I muscled (ha) through and had a grand old time. The leaves were just beginning to turn, and the mountains were a beautiful ombre of every tree color imaginable.

What are these strange floofs and are they related to pygmy puffs?

It’s a big touristy spot, so there was a really nice restaurant about halfway down with bibimbap and really incredible pajeon. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the name of the place was. I was too hungry to care, so I had some tunnel-vision going. Food.


I’d never seen lotus in its natural environment. Those strange roots they serve at school come from these? Incredible.

We also had a bit of an off-road adventure to get to a nearby park. The bike path doesn’t go to it, as far as we know, so we lugged our bikes up and down forest trails, slipping and sliding and being laughed at by the men behind us. Hey, you guys arrived twenty minutes after we did. Take that.

It was so worth it though. The park was quiet, lush, and right on a kind of peninsula into the dam area. It looked more like a lake, really, and with the mountains and lotus leaves, you could believe you were in the middle of nowhere. Never mind the ahjumma’s next to you dancing to their trot music.

The dam itself. Dam.


We stopped for coffee and to rest a little at the park; I got mine iced, which flummoxed the vendor, but it was warm in the sun. And I really, really wanted a picture of the man selling chestnuts. He had the most incredible beard I’ve seen here. But in beard-language, it could have meant “nice old grandfather” or “seriously creepy.” I didn’t want to take the chance.


Cabbages getting ready for kimchi.

It was a nice way to spend Halloween, at any rate, since Korea doesn’t do much for the holiday. And as it’s beginning to be really cold here, it was the perfect opportunity.

Looking back, that was one of the best excursions I took in Korea, which makes me a little sad, not that it wasn’t amazing, but that I didn’t do more of it while I was there. I should have seen everything. I should have made it the perfect two and a half years. I should have…

No, I shouldn’t. It was perfect, every moment.



Writing as a Multipotentialite

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A writer's artfully messy desk.
Mess. Mess. MESS. It’s fine though, I styled it this way.

You’d have thought I would realize being a multipotentialite would affect me as a writer as well. You’d have thought I would see myself jumping ship on writing projects, having millions of disparate ideas, and being constantly interested in other types of writing and say, oh, right, multipotentialite. Duh…

You can see where this is going. I didn’t see it or say that. I applied the same old toxic thought processes I’d had for myself on a grand scale, back before I found out I was a multipotentialite, and ground myself in the mortar and pestle of guilt and shame about how I wrote.

Ever find these thoughts ranging about in your head like chickens?

“I have to finish this before I can work on that.”

“I shouldn’t be blogging now – I’m in the middle of a story!”

“I haven’t blogged in months, but I don’t feel like it. God, I’m the worst.”

“I want to work on this story, but I also want to write a D&D campaign, and I want to write in my journal, and an e-course sounds fun to write too…”

…ad nauseam.

Sounds a lot like what you tell yourself about all your hobbies and career interests before you find out you’re allowed to have many passion, don’t it? Hmm? HMM? Yeah, I wasn’t too smart.

The thing is -and there’s always a thing, isn’t there – we don’t hear about multipotentialites in regards to things like writing or sub-sects of our own hobbies a whole lot. I get it; the entire idea of being an awesome multipotentialite/scanner/multipod/renaissance person is fairly new, so we just haven’t seen the explosion of advice on the internet. It’s a baby in the self-help world still.

But it affects it. And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s affecting painters and comic makers and sewers and other creative types as well. We’re varying our interests within an interest and it’s hard not to come down, well, hard on ourselves.

I’ll be writing a separate article about tips and tricks for writers, but if you’ve felt like me – in other words, constantly guilt-ridden over not following all the advice of writers out there – know you’re not alone. And know, just for now, that you’re perfectly wonderful and normal and you need to jump between writing projects as much as writing and life in general. Like, I don’t know, writing and professional knife-throwing. Or cliff diving. Whatevs. (Why do I assume other writers are so much more badass than I am? I write and, uh, knit. And play D&D. And wish for a cat. That’s a Friday evening for me.)

I always eat alone; Stories of Adulthood

Audra Edmonson4 Comments

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you’re single, roommate or no, you probably eat alone the majority of the time.

I do. And have, for nearly the past decade. Except on dates, the few occasions I eat with my brother while we watch Youtube, and the rare all-family dinner, I eat alone. I eat breakfast in the car on the way to work on in front of my computer. I eat lunch either in my car during the work day or also in front of my computer. I eat dinner…the same way. See above.

I never really thought about it, to be honest. I mean, food’s food, right?

Then I went to Korea, where food and community and bonding are tightly twisted and knotted together, leading to taboos for eating alone. There’s a whole Korean drama about a woman who finds an eating pal because she loves to eat and can’t eat in restaurants alone. I mean, we don’t really do that in America, either, but it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

I was thinking about while eating a salad a few days ago, because it’s not easy to eat a salad delicately. Unless you take the trouble to cut up all your lettuce into easy-to-fit-on-fork pieces, you’re stabbing some big leafy bits that inevitably end up depositing a nice rim of dressing around your mouth on the way in. It’s irritating, but when you eat alone, who cares?

So then I thought, whew, it’s a good thing I’m not on a date, because then I’d have to spend some brainpower to make sure I wasn’t being Ralphie’s kid brother Randy on A Christmas Story. “Show me how the piggy eats,” indeed.

Maybe no one else has this issue. Maybe most other people learn to eat nicely when they’re young and it just takes hold so they never have to think about it again, like holding your pencil the right way. So they don’t have to think in their cars about how much thought they’ll have to put in on dates. Maybe. Or maybe most people are like me, slobs and messy when they’re alone and have time to fix their makeup before going back in to work, and overly careful on dates and in public because eating cleanly isn’t a habit.

Or…just maybe, I’m overthinking this. Well, that’s what being an adult means, right? Overthinking, worrying about dates, and being alone in cars during lunch to get away from work. Yeah, nailing this thing.

Is there anything you do that makes you wonder if you’re the only one who does it?

New Year, New Series

Audra Edmonson2 Comments

Blogging has always been a form of experimentation for me. There was my stint with doing the journal excerpts, the brief period where I posted poetry, and the general dumping of my life into the internet and seeing what happens. I tried to make a series out of that, with the Hello, I’m…Discovery series, the Game Master series, and so on, and now I’d like to add one more.

The Stories of Adulthood series. Really, it will be just another way for me to clarify my intentions with posts instead of rambling on and on (like this one does).

Blogging, to me, feels like community. I like hearing about other people’s lives, and I think they like hearing about mine, so with this new series, let’s all laugh at ourselves and share ridiculous stories about being an adult, eh?

Here we go.