This year was the year of historic houses. What began as curiosity soon transformed into an obsession with wanting to visit as many homes as possible. When you start visiting these homes, you start seeing patterns. There is one thing I know for certain though, and that is the preservation of these homes is important for not only the re-telling of history, but also bringing that history to life. It's surreal to be in the homes of people I've heard stories about, to be walking in their steps, admiring the same things they once did. I've had the privilege of visiting ten historic homes this past year, and here is everything that I think about them.

Opulence? You haven't even seen it until you've been to Kykuit. The lush, green overgrowth on the front of the house, coupled with the ornate, over the top details make this house truly one of a kind. It doesn't shy away from its grandiosity, echoing the wealth of its owner John D. Rockefeller. The house is secluded in the estate, overshadowed by trees and enclaves of flowers. I remember gasping when I made it to the front of the house. I was overwhelmed, but in the most beautiful way. The architecture is classical, and everything, down to the placement of statues, was intentional. I'd say that the outside of the house is what really took my breath away; the gardens and the view of the Hudson was marvelous and definitely worth seeing. | Rating: 8/10

Stoicism, an indifference to pleasure or pain. Existing in this way sounds almost inhospitable to the soul; how could our fleshy, warm bodies survive within the dreary, glacial chambers of detachment? Summoned by my intrigue in stoicism, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control by Ryan Holiday fell into my lap. Nothing could prepare me for the mind-bending, soul-twisting wisdom that awaited me.

As I ripen from the tangles of young adulthood, I've realized that a huge aspect of maturation is separation from self. Whether it is separating from our egos, desires, attachments, or expectations, growing up means growing out of these peripheral ways of being. As we get older, the compass of our life should be guided by principles and virtues that stretch beyond ourselves. When we become deeply self-interested, we create this barrier between us and what actually matters, especially when that excessive self-interest turns against us. 

When we go out of our own way to ensure that everything is easy, we are robbing ourselves of the opportunity to grow. As I reflected on this idea, it made me realize that so much of our lives are spent mitigating risks in an attempt to always feel comfortable and safe. Our relentless search to "feel good" might actually be doing us more harm. The truth is that life is hard, it has always been hard, and there is no doubt in my mind that it will continue to be hard, but what if instead of numbing ourselves from this truth, we ran towards it? There is something kind of magical in embracing difficulty, and treating it the same as you would treat anything else. 

Sometimes, to get the things that we want, we must trudge through the mud. Many of us might look at the mud and turn back before we even step in. Some of us might dig our heels into the mud, only to give up after a few steps. A Stoic might detach themselves from the idea of the mud being anything but mud, and through discipline, trudge forward until they had reached the end. All of this to say that our power lies within us. It doesn't matter if the mud is difficult to walk through. There is no point in waiting for the right time of day to walk through the mud, nor does it make sense to obsess over how to best walk through the mud. It's just mud, and it will be mud whether you walk through it or not - you just have to decide whether you have the discipline to walk through it at all. It won't be pretty; you may fall and make a fool of yourself, you'll be stained with particles and mush, you may even be the only one in the mud while everyone else watches, but can you live with yourself without having tried at all?

I am flawed in that I have assumed that the purpose of life is to be happy, but is happiness really all that there is? Easily attained happiness and comfort feel fleeting. There must be more to existence than just wanting to feel good. What would happen to us if we sought discomfort, intentionally doing the hard things before we tried doing anything else? What if choosing to do the hard things makes us more resilient and powerful? Stoicism isn't about having no desires, it's about not letting your desires control you.

Some quotes that deeply resonated with me:

• "Sometimes it's having the strength to not do the thing you want to do more than anything else in this world."
  
• "To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later...the graveyard of lost potential , we might say, is filled with people who just needed to do something else first."
  
• "Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul."
  
• "We move the goalposts so the game doesn't get boring and, more important, so it never ends."
  
• "People who are doing less important things than you can get away with not being in control. You can't."
  
• "We choose the hard way...because in the long run, it's actually the only way.​"

I was sifting through a thrift store when I found a frayed, ragged book sleeve titled "A Treasury of Victorian Ghost Stories" Edited by Everett F. Bleiler. As a lover of the macabre, I could feel the book pulling at me, yearning to be read. The Victorians were death-obsessed — mourning, deceased portraits, jewelry made of loved one's hair  — it made sense that they found salvation in ghost stories. How often do we hear the re-telling a good "old fashioned" ghost story? I was intrigued, and I had no idea what  was lurking beneath the sleeve.

Ghost stories were a very fine-tuned art form, but all of them had one thing in common: they involved ghosts, literally. If I could explain the journey of reading this book with an analogy, it would be this: it might feel redundant to visit the same painting over and over again, but I bet that each and every time you look at it you see something you hadn't seen before. Do I believe in ghosts? Perhaps. The closest thing to a ghost I experienced was during the first night of moving into my house when I was ten years old. I saw a mushy outline of a man smiling, and waving at me through the bathroom window. I went downstairs to ask my mom if there was someone working on the side of the house, she said no. 

There were so many stories in this book; old ghost dog barking when soldiers fell asleep, dark cloaked woman waiting in a cemetery for her one true love, old dead lady wearing black in a casino, wet ghost footsteps from a girl who drowned. Even though all of the stories are centered around ghosts, they were each so unique and separate from one another which goes to show the diversity of the genre and how many places it could go. 

One of my favorite stories was "The Library Window" by Margaret Oliphant. There's this young girl who becomes obsessed, almost driven to madness, while looking across the street into this window of a library. As the story develops, she begins to see a man through the window, a man devoted to writing. She begins to tether herself to this phantom, obsessing over who he is and whether she will continue to see him. Oliphant makes you feel this sort of relentless frustration and yearning. The man never acknowledges the girl, going about his writing as if she wasn't even there. Through her words, it feels as if you're climbing on a ladder, only to be pushed off of it when you realize that the man does not exist. For a moment, I actually hoped that he did exist. A part of me hoped that he would look across the window and finally see her, but alas he was just a ghost. This story mimics the many tales of female insanity and obsession that were written during that time (very "The Yellow Wallpaper" kind of vibes)

​Another story that really caught my attention was "Ken's Mystery" by Julian Hawthorne. Ken was traveling and ends up in a cemetery with a ghost of a woman who asks him to play his banjo. Upon the end of the trip, he finds that his banjo is rotted as if it were centuries old even though it was given to him by his friend quite recently. This story is fascinating because there are a lot of questions that left to be answered, specifically how did his banjo rot after playing for the ghost? The tying of a physical object to the horrific experience that he endured made the story a lot more intriguing, giving it a more tangible presence. It would've been one thing if he just saw the ghost and it disappeared, but he now has something to prove that this encounter really did happen. 

There's a certain mysterious, romanticism in the way Victorian writers told these stories, even if they were meant to be horrific and gruesome. These stories were good at making you feel uneasy, and apprehensive of what was going to happen next. Even though you had an idea of what might happen, the journey getting there left you on the edge of your seat. You knew the pin would drop, but you wouldn't know when, and that kind of tactic is effective when telling ghost stories. It also helps that there is no perfect ending to these stories; you're left wondering what actually did or didn't happen. As Edgar Allen Poe once said, "Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see."