Dog days are over

World's first bungee jump site at Kawarau Bridge, Queenstown, New Zealand, circa long before I knew enough to worry about retinal detachment risk

As usual, I haven't posted in a long while. I'm more than 7 months of the way through an internship that everyone and their mother swore would fly by. I blinked 3 times and now less than 5 months remain! Now that I've gotten the hang of this internship gig I'm starting to feel twinges of regret that I'll be leaving this job and the teammates I've grown to trust for yet another brand new start.

Wait, maybe regret isn't the right word. Maybe it's really that I'm getting comfortable again and sense that the start of residency represents another departure from a comfort zone I've worked damned hard to dig from gristle and stone.

But comfort zones are suspiciously synonymous with ruts, which is why one of my recent resolutions is to leave mine every chance I get. I've managed to take a proverbial breath and leap several times this year, and you know what? I feel more alive already.

Maya Angelou wrote that our routines lead us to forget that life is an ongoing adventure. I admit that lately my gut response to the thought of moving (again!) and starting over (again!) is more trepidation than excitement. But as I look back at some of the most fun & worthwhile things I've done, I see they all started unassumingly with plans and progress forged more through luck and serendipity than my own master planning skills.

I sometimes envy my colleagues who have worked their whole lives toward a single goal. They seem happy and, well...settled. I admire their ability to set their sights on and achieve exactly what they want from a young age. At the same time, I accept that my more tortuous path was exactly right for me and has heavily shaped my identity.

Now that I'm a grown-up, I'd like to put down some solid roots and say yes to new experiences. Other than my residency program & field of medicine, I can't say exactly where I'm headed. But I do know that at my core I have an adventurous spirit that could use some fresh air after a couple years spent in hibernation. Here's to letting it out.

Florence and the Machine - "Dog Days Are Over" (streaming)

Monsters of Folk - "Say Please" (streaming)