My room is generally a mess — half my bed is usually covered in books, marginally clean clothes, notes and mail; my dresser is cluttered with vitamins, thumbtacks, pens (some missing lids) and hair clips; my bookshelf moonlights not only as a filing cabinet, but a scrapbook too. I have a small chest of drawers from Ikea on my dresser, which I gave up trying to assemble according to the instructions. The drawers are now, miraculously, held together solely by rubber bands. I got tired of hammering. It’s an eye sore, but it holds stuff.

At best, my room looks like a grad student has yet to finish decorating. And I’ve lived here two years. The one thing I am vigilant about cleaning is my floor, which I vacuum daily, because I shed so much hair.

For the most part, I am fine living like this. I can still find what I need. I don’t have much space to begin with. I’m not trying to impress anyone. It doesn’t bother me.

But any time I’ve got a lot of my mind, I have an irrepressible urge to clean. Like, move everything out of my room and evaluate whether my possessions are worth keeping kind of cleaning. It’s as if organizing the external things in my life subconsciously organizes the internal ones too. I don’t know how it works, but it does. Doing something as mindless as cleaning keeps me from overanalyzing, which somehow results in feeling peaceful about whatever was bothering me.

Once all the dust bunnies are gone and the random papers are trashed and my bed is cleared, I tell myself that I’ll keep it up — every day — so it won’t turn into an exhausting weekend of trash bags, Clorox wipes and Windex. But without fail, I always let things slide. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing though. I never know when I’ll get the urge to clean, but I might as well have a room in need of it .

I am sitting on the train. My PhD defence is tomorrow. I feel like I’m under water, slowly slowly drifting upwards. I can already glimpse the sparkling sun above me, magically sending rainbows my way. The heavy weight of the deep sea has lifted from my chest, and although I’m not yet ready to breathe, I can feel a strange calm, soothing my aching body for those last hours.

A long journey is coming to an end. It started with a jump into cold water, turned into a long and hard dive into unknown seas, and came to its close in almost complete darkness. Strange creatures accompanied me there, first colourful, then bleak and often frightening. From the darkness I followed the light, growing brighter and brighter by the day, the pressures of heavy dark water lifting ever so slowly, until I could see the surface again and realised the journey was almost over.

So I take these last hours to look back into the dark, to say farewell to those dark creatures who have made this journey frightening and intense, bumpy and deep. They have also made it MY journey, and although I certainly won’t miss them – deep down they’ve known this all along, and maybe that’s why they’re the way they are? – I want to face them one last time and carry their imprint in my heart forever as a token of hope.

Every journey, however difficult and dark, comes to an end. Every end is also a beginning, and I cannot wait to see this one unfold, up there, in the warm and sparkling sun.

* I am typing this from the handwritten version on the day of my defence. All is well, I can breathe now.

There are certain moments from my past that have held their place in my consciousness since the day they happened. While other memories faded, drifted to more distant parts of my brain or vanished within minutes of occurring, a seemingly arbitrary collection of snippets has remained. Like the inside pocket of every purse I own that is always used to hold my house key, there are areas of my mind that harbor flashes of time that don’t seem to make much sense in terms of their longevity. Why would it be important for me to remember one tiny exchange with a high school girlfriend when I was barely 16 years old? The one where, as we headed to bed after a late night out, I said to her, “I’m so tired…so tired I’m not even going to wash my face.”

Even in high school, after a few sleepovers and slumber parties, my friends knew I had a non-negotiable ritual at bedtime: Washing my face. Instilled in me by my mother from the time I was a teenager, the act of washing my face — along with an array of other steps like moisturizing and toning — became a ritual that has stayed with me my entire life. No matter where I am or how tired I am, if I have water and sink (even a bowl will do) my face will be clean before I go to sleep. But every once in a while, I give myself permission to go to bed with the day’s makeup and dirt still intact, and when that happens I think of that conversation.

There is something comforting in the knowledge that this is a ritual I have been devoted to for nearly 30 years, that through all the twists and turns life has thrown me, in all the different countries and cities I’ve visited, I have taken this routine with me. Through everything, washing my face at the end of the day provides me with a few precious moments when time stands still and the world is quiet. The grime of the day is washed away, and every step of this process lets my body know it is time to wind down and prepare for whatever dreams lay in store for me.

The night I told my friend I was so tired I wasn’t going to wash my face, she totally got it — she knew I was tired. Really tired. Her knowing that didn’t have any profound effect on our friendship or the course of that evening; in many ways it was meaningless. But it stayed with me nonetheless, and I am beginning to think the reason it continues to shine from the dark recesses of my memory is that it provides a bookmark, something that shows me how long I’ve practiced this ritual — that despite so many changes and moves and travels, there have been small pockets of consistency in my life. Washing my face every night is not a practice that is going to change my life, but it is a small act of kindness towards myself that never fails to make me feel good, and perhaps that is enough — as with any act of kindness towards anyone, sometimes the smallest deeds are enough.

Eric and I just returned from a three-week European adventure. We saved and planned for over a year to travel five countries. In every city, we painted scenarios of us living in urban flats and taking a daily meal at a neighborhood café. The whole experience was so magical that we found it hard to recognize why the locals often seemed bored with their surroundings.

A few examples:

I took pictures of everything in Barcelona’s Parc Guell, the municipal masterpiece of architect Antoni Gaudi. To me it felt like a wonderland, somewhat Dr. Seuss meets Central Park. Mosaic dragons and sprawling staircases carved into the hills met green space and hiking trails. Barcelonans? Had their nose in a book, perhaps clueless to their surroundings.

In Paris, we ate twice at a small café devoid of tourists (except, of course, for us). Our outdoor table had a view of the Eiffel Tower and we ate at our leisure. The waiter sat with a table of older gentleman who smoked and gossiped until he was needed. We saw at least three Smart Cars come and go, and every other person had a baguette in their grocery bag. Parisians just proceeded through their evening as though this was nothing special, with their backs to the Eiffel Tower.

So now that we are back to our normal life, I am trying to take account of all the magical parts of my ordinary days. What would a foreign visitor find intriguing and wonderful about my surroundings and routine? The downtown skyline wholly visible on our evening walk with the dog? The abundance of independent coffee shops I frequent? The eclectic diversity of my neighborhood?

My house might not look like something from Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and the view of Houston’s skyscrapers might not rival the Eiffel Tower, but I love it anyway. I love the color and the surprises and the sense of home I feel. My life here has it’s own brand of mystery and magic that I will try not to forget so often.

Do you ever think about the little things, the details that make up the decisions, actions and reactions in our life? Do you ever wonder how so many tiny, insignificant occurrences can be the ones that ultimately shape who we become?

Example: My girlfriend and I started dating after a party during our senior year of college. We’d known each other all semester, admired one another from afar but never talked much one-on-one before that night. The thing is, I almost didn’t go to the party at all.

It was the end of the semester and I had my last class the following morning. I had to be in attendance or I was forfeiting my credits for the course. At the last moment, I decided I’d go but I wouldn’t stay long. Long story short, we ended up talking until morning, though neither of us knew what it meant at the time. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together, and the fact that we same so close to missing out on all of it is humbling.

Example: My current job is the result of two things: a conversation I had with a co-worker at my previous job and a layoff about a month after the conversation. Both the conversation and the layoff almost didn’t happen.

We were on our way back from a story assignment, one that had been rescheduled twice and had nearly been canceled altogether. Save for a last-ditch effort to make the story happen, we never would have been in my car driving back that day, discussing his wife’s job. Two months later, his wife was interviewing me to be her co-worker.

Why was I being interviewed? Because a few weeks after that conversation, I was laid off as part of a staff reduction at our newspaper. The company needed to lose two employees, and they had no preference. We were all given a week to decide whether we would take a severance package and leave the newsroom. If they didn’t get two volunteers, they would start with the shortest length of tenure. Um, “Calling the kid straight out of college…you’re fired.” One co-worker knew immediately that she would take the package, but it wasn’t until the day before decisions had to be made that I knew someone else was considering it.

“Take it, take it!” I secretly willed him. He was a friend and I liked him, but I was desperate to stay in work. Eventually he decided he had a new family to support and he had to stick around. I respected that, but still got cut. A month later I was in my new position, and six months after that he was laid off anyway. Neither of us had any idea at the time how much uglier the industry was about to get. He’s still struggling to find the right fit and I just passed my first anniversary with my current employer. I’ve felt guilty ever since about the way it transpired, but I can’t avoid the fact that a lot of small stars aligned to lead my life’s path.

More than just the guilt, one has to wonder how things might have been different, good or bad, if just a detail here and a mindless decision there had been made otherwise. It can become too much if you let it.

The small things are what this blog is all about at its core. I’ve written so much in the past year about the way things have been in my past, while so much of my life is thinking about what’s here and now and what’s to come. If I’ve learned anything along the way, it should probably be that I can fret about the past and plan for the future all I want, but none of it will mean anything if the Chinese food I ate for lunch today somehow becomes the catalyst for the life I’ll be leading in 30 years. As frustrating as that might be, it’s also pretty damn comforting. Something about just going out there, doing what we do and seeing where it ends up sounds nice, even if it means giving up control.