These Shoes Were Made For Walking (or, 'aspirations i noticed in the bottom of my shopping bags')

I don't know how long I'll feel like I'm in the 'getting ready' phase of my sabbatical... perhaps this initial time is already nearly over. After all, tomorrow I plan to spend the entire day parked up at the kitchen table at Michelle and Ness's place (with Matey their dog keeping me company), catching up on emails but also doing things (reviewing things, writing things, agreeing to things, saying no to things, replying to things, signing up for things) that are 'work related.'

But today? Today we went shopping... actually most of this week I've been looking at shops with Mum and Auntie Nanie... and all of this is significant because I'm not a super-materialistic sort of girl. I'm not the girl who goes on holidays in order to go shopping. Sure, I like things; but I don't rush about accumulating stuff for the sake of it. (Or so i tell myself...)

Anyway, I'm now the proud owner of new shoes: sneakers and spunky high-heeled party shoes. They're sitting here, in their boxes, ready for me to find the occassion to wear them. The sneakers I'll put on tomorrow morning when I take Matey for a walk, and I plan to wear them most days for the rest of my sabbatical. As for the heels, I am on the lookout for occassions to attend at which heels would be suitable; these occassions are unlikely to include the places I've spent most of the past six months (or maybe even the past six and a half years) - at home, in my office, marking essays, writing, reading, hanging with the whanau, spending time on Matiu/Somes Island.

I realise the two kinds of shoe represent two ways I want to extend myself this year: physically (no, not *expand* - extend! - more exercise, not more Alice!) and socially. I hope that this year away from 'it all' will give me a chance to wear these shoes (and of course their respective occassions) out.  No, I don't want to change who I am; I realise that there are all kinds of lines between behaviour and habit and desire and play and fantasy and denial and fraud. I certainly want these two extensions of myself to be additional to 'me' rather than replacing or obscuring parts of what makes me me.

But I also know that I've been thinking a lot over the past six and a half years since moving home that things have moved along lopsidedly: that some things have gone very well, some things have trotted along just fine, and some things haven't been given enough air to breathe or enough time to develop. On a personal level, I think the two major things in that last category are my physical and social lives, and this is why I've got a small tower of shoesboxes beside my bed tonite.

Although I'm always going to be happy in jeans and comfy shoes, and I am sure I've got several years yet of hooded sweatshirts and a ponytail, maybe some days when I get to Toronto I'll try out the idea of being a well-dressed city girl, sipping a latte at a chilled out urban cafe with heels and lipgloss and a yummy handbag big enough for a small laptop, or going out for drinks wearing my heels to the kinds of places people wear heels. Maybe I'll be that girl, and maybe her jeans will be a little looser because she wore her sneakers that morning when she went for a walk to start the day. Maybe when I get home to Wellington in June next year that girl will come home too, a naturally integrated part of who I am rather than an imaginary part I'm trying to play.

Tomorrow morning, I'll start moving towards being that girl - who I am sure is really this girl, when this girl gives herself the time and energy - by wearing new blue sneakers while I take someone else's dog for a walk around a nearby park.