If I'm being entirely honest, and I try to be, there's only one thing I want in the world today today. I want to go to Europe.


I want to forget about numbers and metrics and money altogether, want to forget about health insurance and to do lists and making dinner each night.


I want to tool around Europe with a camera, filling my soul with pasta and cappuccinos and phrases and images. I want to read and write and take pictures and breathe. I want my whole job to be beauty-finding, because I'm pretty sure I'd be really good at it.


I wanted that more today than I have in awhile. Life has been hectic recently—sad and stressful all at once. This week, I’ve felt busy and listless, motivated and bored. I knew something was up when I didn't coo over the drizzly winter weather that usually sends me into a writing frenzy.


Instead, I sat on my computer making my rounds between inboxes, and Facebook, starting a blog post and then stopping. I printed out blog calendars and a bunch of other new years planners with grand ambitions of planning my life and then scraped them to the side declaring aloud that I have no patience for that kind of nonsense today.


I don't know what's up this week—why life feels so full and busy and hard and blah all at the same time.


I can't make sense of feeling stressed and bored in the same breath, and can't tell you why my soul is craving beauty and Europe so acutely right now.


All I can tell you is that it is.


And so after a long day of busying around and getting next to nothing done, I decided to give up and head to a little sanctuary I’d forgotten all about.


You see—our office is on top of an Italian restaurant. But not just a restaurant, a cute restaurant, and one that plays croony-European-Sinatra-wine drinking music all day and all night.


But it didn't cross my mind to hide here until today.


And so fed up and defeated and unable to muster inspiration or resolve on this rainy gloomy day, I headed downstairs for a stiff drink—a cappuccino of course.


Sitting at the table alone in the corner of an empty restaurant, I took a deep breath. I allowed the music to warm my grey soul, and stared into my cappuccino with nothing more pressing in the world to do than that.

Something happened to me in the hour I sat in that restaurant. The color came back to my cheeks and to my soul, and my heart began to feel fuller and more delighted by the world than it has in awhile. Something about that restaurant and that cappuccino, or that moment alone, and moment to care for my insides brought me back to life in a way I sorely needed.


The thing is, we may not be able to jet off to Italy every time life feels blah, but in some ways we can.


We can find bits of Italy in our life and grab onto them with both hands. We can listen to that voice within us that's crying out for fun, or delight, or something delicious. And we can give in, giving some love and some color to our inner dreamy selves who so often are overlooked for the sake of efficiency.


And so that's what I chose to do today. There's nothing in the world I want more than Europe, and so God gave me an Italian restaurant downstairs. It's not exactly the same, but for today it's pretty darn close. I'll take it.


I hope you get to go to Europe today, wherever you may find it.


P.S. Here's a podcast episode all about finding rest and filling your cup back up.

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