Lately I’ve found my internal thoughts a bit more chaotic than usual. We moved a family of seven to a new state, to a new community, and I began a new job. This brought numerous new things into our lives—many of which we anticipated—and more than a few we didn’t.

As things have sped up in my life recently I’ve felt the need to be even more intentional on slowing down my internal space. Two things in my life correlated to cause me to see this uniquely. First, I read this thought-proking article from the Harvard Business Review called The More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal. Second, I bought a typewriter at a garage sale for a dollar (featured in the picture above). That got me thinking that a typewriter would slow me down enough to write differently and process through my thoughts. The only problem is that my typewriter doesn’t currently work. I plan on taking it into a shop to get looked at, but in the process I found a really cool app made by Tom Hanks called Hanx Writer.

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I’ve lived in Portland for more than a month now, and as I write this we are experiencing our first real rain since I’ve been here. For those that know me well, I love the rain. It was actually a contributing factor to my original interest in moving to the Pacific Northwest. We were at a friends’ house this evening and they laughed as my kids literally kept stopping what they were doing to point out the rain and enjoy it.

Now type these words on my front porch and I’m in awe of the sound of the rain falling into the trees around my house and the intoxicating smell of the crisp air filling my lungs. It makes me feel both sleepy and yet somehow alive at the same time. But the irony is that almost everyone I’ve talked to around here is dreading the fact the rain is back. This summer has been one of the driest in recent memory and yet many Oregonians have been soaking up every ounce of sunshine.

It’s the difference of perspective. I spent the summer in the intense Arizona heat only to come to Oregon at the end of a very warm summer and into a house with no air conditioning (yes my AZ friends, you read that right). I could not wait for the cooler air to come. Yet everyone keeps telling me how tired I’ll get of the rain once it begins in earnest. I have no idea whether I will get sick of the rain and when that might happen if it does, but I also know that I’ve spent my entire life in sunshine. I’ve never really had seasons with leaves that change and snow that signals the arrival of Christmas. My new friends around me have a very different experience than that.

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