Zara top (similar)
Mango jeans
Mango belt
Celine sunglasses
Chanel handbag
Chanel flats
Celine necklace (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Place Benjamin Zix – Strasbourg, France
Strasbourg, May 31, 2023
Dear friends,
I love to make plans. This isn’t news – in fact, the statement probably feels a bit repetitive. But it’s important to what I’m about to say next. For a big part of my (pre-pandemic) life, the joy of making plans was just as much about determining what I could do as it was about figuring out what I could put off until some later date, because it was expensive or inconvenient or… something.
We’ve talked about this – just recently, in fact. In my life before 2020, it seemed as though time stretched out infinitely before me. I was convinced there would always be another holiday, another chance, another opportunity to do whatever it was I’d left out of my plans this time. I lost only eighteen months of travel – we were stuck at home from March 2020 to October 2021 – which seems trivial in the grand scheme of things. But the strange half-life that began in early 2020 went on for the better part of three years. The moments we all missed in that time won’t happen in some undefined future. They’ve passed. The plans we might have made will never materialise.
I learned, perhaps belatedly, that life is short and nothing should be taken for granted. Which is why we made plans to come to Strasbourg even though my enthusiasm for the idea of the trip was moderate at best. We’d talked about visiting so many times. Why did we keep waiting? When did we think this trip would happen, if we didn’t make plans for it now?
So we made our plans. We came to Strasbourg. And, perhaps predictably, I didn’t love it. But I know that now, in a way I never would have if I’d simply kept putting it off to some future date, thinking there would always be more time. That’s a wonderful thought, but it’s not true. Time is finite. None of us will ever again be as young and as able as we are in this moment. When we have chances that we choose not to take, there’s no guarantee that we’ll have them again. I don’t yet know for sure – I’ll report back when I’m a little older, when friends aren’t sending me memes that say, “Always stationary but never stationary,” and laughing at how they describe me perfectly, because I’ve finally slowed down a bit – but conventional wisdom suggests that the only thing we really regret are the chances we didn’t take.
We took a chance on Strasbourg. We made plans, we experienced something new – and it wasn’t perfect, but that wasn’t the point. The point was taking the chance now, because we had it. That’s how I want to live the next part of my life; like it’s happening right now, because it is.
