Lucy wrote a blog post a few days ago for the EUIP blog about the Hollywood House mantra for the year: "Be Here Now." And with less than a month left in LA, it seems more appropriate than ever to keep reminding ourselves what this year was, no IS, about.
But it's difficult when you're in the middle of a transitional year not to think about where your life is headed. Isn't that exactly part of why we all signed up for this year anyway? A year of discernment, questioning, figuring it all out. However, given a variety of factors that I'm not sure anyone saw coming, the program year didn't play out in the way a lot of people expected. I can't speak for all the houses, but in Hollywood, from Day 1 everyone's schedules were jam-packed (shocker, living in LA), for the greater part of the year roommate-time was down to about two exhausted waking hours a day if we all ended up at home in the evenings, and weeks flew by with little sign of a reprieve.
Toward the spring, everyone started to worry, sometimes visibly, about what the coming months, and years, might hold. We were all making plans and decisions, and not just about whether or not to head to the beach over the weekend (let's be honest, that was never really a question for us anyway), I'm talking big life-changing decisions, the kind that after they're made you feel a thousand times lighter, as though you might just float away.
And THAT'S when the "Be Here Now" mantra came in handy for me. I've had a million (only a slight exaggeration) decisions to make in the last few months, most of which drew the greater part of my thoughts, dreams, and hopes away from the West Coast. (I'll be moving to DC in less than a month to start a graduate program.) And this thing that we keep saying to ourselves in Hollywood, be here now, has been one of the ways that I keep reminding myself to stay engaged and connected to the community I have here, to this place I've recently started catching myself referring to as home.
Despite the schedules and the seemingly nonexistent time to figure our lives out, discernment, and eventually decisions, bubbled up through every empty space in our go, go, go Hollywood lifestyles. And now that most of those decisions are made and we can all float away if we so choose, I know my Hollywood girls will continue to live out and into our community, to be here now.
