Hello, you!

I’m Emily Anne Allbaugh. Not long ago I was “Emily Keach,” but now I am officially “Emily Allbaugh.” One of the best parts about my new name — besides marking my marriage to the love of my life, Jake — is that now my initials (EAA) sound like a crowd cheering for touchdown.

…Or maybe a dramatic championship point at Wimbledon. Whacking a fuzzy little ball around on the tennis court is life-giving (one of my favorite phrases) to me. So much so that I played on the tennis team for four years at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. As a 10-year-old first picking up a racket it seemed like a non-factor that I could play as a senior citizen, as my parents continually highlighted. Now, though I am nowhere near receiving social security, I enjoy still being able to hit and compete. Hopefully quite more civilly than the crew in Bridesmaids.

I was born and raised in San Diego — more specifically, in a suburban town called Alpine, approximately 30 miles east of the coast. I am a daughter of two happily married, loving parents and a sister to one full-of-life woman, Lauren, five years my elder.

In college I studied English language and literature. Though given my pragmatic logic it was a tough decision to major in lit , delving into literature gave me enough life (like that variation?) that I couldn’t deny that it was the major for me. What I love about studying insightful literature is that it invites you to observe the many unseen factors that underlie the seen world. If you’ll indulge a brief nerd-out session, I’ll try to show you what I mean: far more than a boring novel about the quest for a white whale, Melville’s  Moby Dick exemplifies the restlessness of continued existential ambivalence; Hawthorne’s light and dark imagery in The Scarlet Letter call out the complex relationship between human and natural law. I think studying literature has made me more attuned to seeing what is unseen in my own world.

Fresh out of college, I have continued moseying up the California coast and landed in Campbell, a cute town complete with twinkle-lit trees, in Silicon Valley. Jake and I enjoy driving on windy, redwood-covered roads with no traffic, exploring new places to hike and run, watching British shows such as Sherlock and Downton Abbey, and eating yummy food with friends.

If you would like to contact me for any reason, please send me a message at emallbaugh@gmail.com. I’ll be happy to hear from you! In the meantime, thank you for visiting my blog and exploring with me what it means to be one of 7 billion humans in this strangely and beautifully interconnected world.

Humans are funny creatures.

We laugh, we cry, we do the hokey-pokey. Some choreograph dances, some cure cancer, some sell donkeys, some live on Wall Street. Then there are the bloggers… 

We make steam fume out each others’ ears; we make tears stream down each others’ cheeks out of sadness and out of hilarity. We make love; we make war; we make pancakes. Yada, yada. As frustrating our differences are, we cannot get enough of one another…

Because we are, in essence, relational beings.

Let’s backup: no human seems, to me, entirely good nor entirely bad. Somehow the two get all jumbled up in us.

Yet, everyone is, at some level, connected to other people, be it two or three hundred. Consider how in middle school we ubiquitously mourn the feeling of not having friends. Consider how our crushes consume us in high school, wondering if there could be mutual chemistry after all. And, our ‘being relational’ is not something we grow out of. Cue grandparents’ undeniable love and spoiling of their grand-babies. 

The buck doesn’t stop there though. We do not merely desire any type of relationship. In the belly of our soul, we want to be loved, wholly and rawly, for we are without makeup, a mask, or GQ muscles. 

I believe, along with German philosopher Martin Heidegger, “we are always being shaped by the questions we are asking.” Only if we are considering the right questions, can we can experience life abundantly and be fulfilled in every nook and cranny of every valley and mountain of our souls. 

I hope this blog helps you and me live in such a way that acknowledges and honors that every person is relational indeed. That it sparks an invitation to a long-lost friend into your home for BBQ chicken. That it invites embracing messy, cry-y hugs. That it leads to giving smiles to the gas station clerk. That it makes us deeper, more intentional people. 

It’s living the idea that open books are more alive than closed ones.

May we bear-hug the messy, the funny, and the mundane together to live abundantly and joyfully always.

Standing, gazing up at the trunks and the coniferous leaves of the redwoods towering over me, I asked Kathryn near the end of my phone interview what she loved most about being a professional in the hospitality industry. After all, she directs, “Ambiance and Environment” at a sexy Silicon Valley startup.

“I think how you make people feel is the most important thing in the world,” she divulged.

Something about that resonated with me—how you make someone feel is the most important thing in the world. That explains the nauseating feeling in my gut when I see someone mistreat a gas station worker, a maid, a janitor. They are human, just as much as me or you.

At the core, the most important thing in the world must be outside ourselves. It must be. Or else, as Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn begs, “man…would not be born to die.” Plain and simple. Unless we live in pure pandemonium void of meaning. I’ll table that can of worms for now, though.

What is that something beyond ourselves? Or is it a certain someone? But what about them—won’t they die too?

Waa waa. Excuse the morbid thought. But may this prompt you to dig deeper into what the most important thing in the world is to you. Take up a shovel—be it a best friend, a journal, or a quiet walk through an redwood grove—and start digging to start living out meaning.

What do you—my fellow living, breathing, thinking, lovable, worthy human—what do you think is the most important “thing” in the world?