I drafted this post in my head, and a little bit on here, before leaving for a ~2.5-week trip that I returned from on Sunday night. (But, instead, I left myself some room, and more time for sleep, that last night.)
I prefer to carry on when I travel and usually end up packing my bag to the max. It makes repacking during the trip a challenge, because I’m never repacking with as much time or care as that first time—I’d rather be spending my vacation time doing anything else, everything else. It also means I have no space, really, to pick up anything along the way. This time, as I was finishing packing, I made a conscious choice to leave some room.
It’s in keeping with a larger theme of wanting to of create and leave more room in my life these days. Like, leaving room in my days—giving myself more time, rushing less, and, ideally, not at all—and recently going through my whole apartment to consolidate and organize my belongings. (Outer organization equaled inner, mental organization, and was nice to return to@)
Someone I know used to say, “leave room for surprise,” often, and I like that. Leave room, and space, for the unexpected, because we never know what it’ll be. This time, this trip, it was a bunch of cute, functional and sentimental bachelorette gifts, like a monogrammed bucket hat, and some bigger things, like the dirndl I bought in Munich for Oktoberfest and thought would be a whatever purchase before finding a trendy one (it’s a thing) that was a point of pride, because it ended up eliciting compliments from Germans. I did have to sit on my suitcase to close it that last day, what with all those layers of Bavarian ruffle, but I did have the room!