April in Paris, Chestnuts in Blossom, Holiday Tables Under the Trees

A couple summers ago, I studied in Compiegne, a small town in Northern France. But every weekend, I escaped the small town "charm" to enjoy the Parisian glitz and glam. Before each weekend, my home-stay-mate (I'm patenting that one) and I would spend hours painstakingly planning. After all, we wanted to make the most of each three-day chunk; it was Paris for crying out loud and we had great expectations. Our first day was a roaring success -- on paper. We walked over ten miles from Gare du Nord to Sacré Coeur to Galleries Lafayette to the Paris Opera House to Champs Elysées to l'Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre. But by the time I was standing in front of the Mona Lisa and her creepy creepy eyes, I was so overwhelmed that I was underwhelmed. I had crossed numerous landmarks off my mental checklist, but that's about all I had done.

The thing with traveling is that you don't want to waste a single moment. You realize that time is limited and before you know it you'll be back at home, back to the grind. So in an effort to make the most, you try to do the most. Wandering aimlessly while "taking it all in" seems completely inappropriate. But as I realized during a following weekend in Paris, the whole smelling the roses thing is actually unbelievably fulfilling.

As my college days become increasingly limited, creating a bucket list has become more and more tempting. All the cool kids are doing it (yes, that just came from an almost college graduate). It's as if college, which was once the "back-to-the-grind" has become the "vacation."

But every time I sit down to pen the list (and by pen, I mean type, because I barely own a writing implement), the memory of my ten-mile walk through Paris haunts me. Because it wasn't a ten-mile stroll during which I enjoyed the aroma of pastries. It was a ten-mile relay spent passing the baton from one landmark to the next. Check mark. Making a list will only raise expectations. It will force me to think that I want to do things that I know deep down I could care less about. If I haven't managed to do it in the last three and some odd years, maybe it's not worth it. Call me a cynic, but when we have unfinished items on a list, we spend more time disappointed about said items than reminiscing about those spontaneous, pre-list experiences.

When we come to "time crunch" moments in our life, rather than introducing that tourist-list stress into our lives, it may be more meaningful to take each day as it comes. To embrace spontaneity while continuing to enjoy those aspects of our routine that we have grown to love and will so dearly miss. In my mind, it's the only feasible way to grab time by the horns and slow it down. It puts the person, not a list, in control of the day.

We're never going to be able to do every single thing there is to do. And if we could, would it really be that fulfilling anyway? Don't force it. Go with the flow, do what you want to do, and most importantly, enjoy it.