I can keep plants alive. My purple phalaenopsis orchid has been with me for almost two weeks now and it is looking quite lovely. Apparently it really was my cats mutilating the beautiful greenery given me by Grandma.
Fruit must be perfectly ripe because if it is a day old or a day shy, I will not eat it.
I no longer need a job in order to be happy with myself.
Trader Joe's coffee beans are better than Starbucks any old day.
Ambitions:
It looks like I may not be attending college this semester due to some very poor communication on the part of my new community college and a very busy summer. An involuntary semester off is making me anything but zen-like and after my efforts have been exerted to get into the late-starting classes, I shall accept this and move on.
Pursue some dreams... there are a lot of things I would like to be working on and if I am not going to be in school, some specific art forms are calling my name.
Organize my home as best as I can. With very little storage and no money for additional purchases right now, I will do what I can to put my life in a well-labeled order and have to unpack at a more than leisurely rate.
Lastly--- find what makes me happy. An extraordinary moodiness has been floating around lately and it has grown quite dull. I am ready to breathe some fresh air!
If you've not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren't okay with it, then just wait. You'll find it's fine to be alone once you're embracing it.
We could start with the acceptable places - the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library - where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there, where you can browse the stacks and smell the books. You're not supposed to talk much anyway so it's safe there.
There's also the gym. If you're shy you could hang out with yourself in mirrors, you could put headphones in. And there's public transportation, because we all gotta go places. And there's prayer and meditation. No one will think less if you're hanging with your breath seeking peace and salvation.
Start simple.
Things you may have previously based on your Avoid Being Alone principles:
The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow-downers. Employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town and so they -- like you -- will be alone. Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.
When you are comfortable with eat lunch and run, take yourself out for dinner: a restaurant with linen and silverware. You're no less intriguing a person when you're eating solo dessert to cleaning the whipped cream from the dish with your finger. In fact some people at full tables will wish they were where you were.
Go to the movies where it is dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community. And then, take yourself out dancing to a club where no one knows you.
Stand on the outside of the floor till the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you.
Dance like no one's watching... because, they're probably not. And, if they are, assume it is with best of human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats is, after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you're sweating, and beads of perspiration remind you of life's best things, down your back like a brook of blessings.
Go to the woods alone, and the trees and squirrels will watch for you.
Go to an unfamiliar city, roam the streets, there are always statues to talk to and benches made for sitting give strangers a shared existence if only for a minute and these moments can be so uplifting and the conversations you get in by sitting alone on benches might have never happened had you not been there by yourself
Society is afraid of Alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it. You could stand, swathed by groups and mobs or hold hands with your partner, look both further and farther for the endless quest for company. But no one's in your head and by the time you translate your thoughts, some essence of them may be lost or perhaps it is just kept.
Perhaps in the interest of loving oneself, perhaps all those sappy slogans from preschool over to high school's groaning were tokens for holding the lonely at bay 'cause if you're happy in your head than solitude is blessed and alone is okay.
It's okay if no one believes like you.
All experience is unique, no one has the same synapses, can't think like you. For this be relieved. It keeps things interesting and life's magic things in reach.
And it doesn't mean you're not connected, that community's not present: just take the perspective you get from being one person in one head and feel the effects of it.
Take silence and respect it.
If you have an art that needs a practice, stop neglecting it.
If your family doesn't get you, or religious sect is not meant for you, don't obsess about it.
You could be in an instant surrounded if you needed it.
If your heart is bleeding make the best of it. There is heat in freezing. Be a testament.
A scene often repeated in my mind is a conversation between child-Rachel and grown-up-Rachel. They sit across from each other at outside a fast food restaurant holding dripping ice cream cones while child-Rachel wonders, "What changed?" Grown-up-Rachel realizes where this is going, but takes the bait: "What do you mean?" "I just thought I would grow up to be more, you know... cool." The dialogue goes on as the grown-up me reasons that things just are not as "simple" as they seem in childhood. College costs money. Traveling costs money. Becoming a better author, learning photography, musical instruments, and going on adrenaline-rush excursions to sky-dive and surfing all cost... money. They all cost time, too -- something that hit me as I crossed my twentieth birthday. Life also has surprises. Child-Rachel still does not know that her Nana is about to die from cancer and it will change her world forever. She does not know that while she will always have a soft-spot for the stage, writing is where she will feel most safe, most free, and even most vulnerable. Finally grown-up-Rachel offers, "Challenges and the unknown are coming. The plan will change, but it will become a story. And you, I promise, will not only get through it, but begin to grow into someone that you trust more than your ideals. Our story doesn't stop growing."
If all the world's a stage, then every day I am living my scenes. Great amounts of these have gone by with the mundane and necessary pushing them along. But there is a desire, a deep one, that is growing. There are dreams yet to be realized, people yet to be touched, and a great story in the making. One of the most sacred hopes I have held is the desire to go to attend either Oxford or Cambridge. Originally it was Oxford all the way... but I have found that the decision is not so easy nor is the task itself, so I shall chase my opportunities. The original plan took a detour from its crisp neatness when I opted for a year of ministry school before beginning college. It went even further off-track from "Rachel's Plan A" when I met the most wonderful man in the world while at school and spent the next year, dating, engaged, and getting married. Plan A was discarded and something more tangible, more real, more worthwhile, and requiring more reconciliation with child-Rachel developed. My husband and I are both pursuing double-majors and we just made a move from Texas to the west coast to live in the town and state in which we met and have missed. Community college is the stepping stone we are on now, which will lead to university, which will hopefully aid us in careers along our story-paths. There are travels to be had, books to be written, and eventually living abroad (hopefully where I will pursue my university aspirations) as a counseling team, writing, loving, teaching, and healing.
One of the reasons I very much want to attend the Living a Better Story conference is that I seek refreshment of every day story, every day choices, and every day scenes that go on as sub-plots to our lives. My heart needs inspiration to keep moving, to not see the grand goals of studying abroad, writing books that touch lives, and raising a family that has their own hopes and dreams as intangible possibilities, but inevitable results of choices well made and a life richly lived. Much of what stands in the way of these ideas is finances: money to go to school, money to live, money to travel, money to move. But Father God is the author and perfecter of our faith... and if he perfects something so simultaneously complex and simple, so meaningful as our faith, I know Father will produce this life He leads and make it a story worth sharing.
This post was inspired by a contest to win a trip to Don Miller's Living A Better Story seminar (link) in Portland. He is an author that has inspired some life-changing questions and conversations with my Producer and "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" embodied sentiments I have been struggling to express. I have made more decisions than I can count in pursuit of my great story and some of them have been wrong in more ways than one. In the interest, though, of pursuing a story all the same and learning along the way what it is to live a meaningful adventure with the time I have on earth, I would very much like to attend the seminar as a point of inspiration and refreshment.
If you would like to find out more about this conference, check out the following video:
Every person has a story. To some extent, we are the director, the writer, and the actors to our lives. Our choices indicate what scenes will arrive and in what order. We script our own dialogue and often coach it out of others. The private moments, the deep meaningful ones, are completely at our dispense. As we live it out, we follow Shakespeare's "As You Like It":
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.
Like an author about her characters, I have to wonder about myself: Where am I going? What am I doing? Who is a part of it? And so very intrinsically: Why? These are the questions I have been pondering in my heart as long as I can remember. Even as a child I knew that I wanted my life to be an adventure. Children are meant to be dreamers. There is an imagination level they have and because it tends to be curbed by time and experience, adults forget how to understand and value this gift. Childhood is the beginning, as every story must have. It is the the sweeping concepts, grand ideas, high hopes, and imagined impossibilities of the story of our life. Maturity constructs a storyboard from this and accepts that a story cannot be all highs in order to have depth. Maturity embraces adversity, frustration, growth, mistakes, and tragedy not as the end, but as the means for enriching character.
Living the adventure meant something a little different, although not wholly irrelevant, as a child. Unlimited by trivial details like finances and fears, I expected to have traveled half of the globe by this age of twenty, as well as conquering many skills such as writing, surfing, photography, bungee jumping, painting, skydiving, singing, scuba diving, sailing, para-sailing, guitar playing, piano playing, and playing with dolphins. Somewhere in that not-too-busy life, I was supposed to have already earned my bachelor's degree and be gliding my way toward a master's and doctorate in English, emphasis in creative writing, maybe double major in British literature. No sweat.
While I am still ambitious to accomplish many of these dreams (albeit somewhat modified and in a more reasonably time and manner), there are more pieces to this story than I had anticipated.
You might notice that I did not mention the producer in my introduction of roles. That is because it is arguably the most crucial role in all of this and I have chosen to relinquish that to the one who has my deepest affections. He has more experience and wisdom in managing life than I could ever hope and he has proven himself time and again as someone capable of handling my heart in a thoughtful way. Now and again we delegate roles in our story to others, allowing them to call the shots, either out of deference, humility, or fear. Eventually, we have to take those back on at some point, but with this one I do not intend to do so. It is my deepest desire (one so deep that I am often terribly afraid of it) to write, direct, and act out my life story in such a way, that it has substance enough to be produced. The one who loves and knows me better than I know myself gets the final word on my decisions and I want him to be happy with the final cut... that is exactly why I go to him in high hopes or tears: "So does this girl move to California or stay with her family in Texas? Where is the story going?"
Yesterday I spent some time contemplating what it would have been like to stay in Texas. Joshua and I both really miss my family a lot and eventually had to just stop talking about it yesterday in order to enjoy the trip. We are having a fantastic time now, but the feeling lingers that different paths are always available to us. We can make bad choices, good choices, great choices. And sometimes, it really is just a choice. What will you do with your life? Where will you go? What are your goals? Someone said something the night before we left that made me feel guilty about leaving and I had to wonder if the whole thing was a giant gesture of selfishness. Confessing this to my brother, I almost needed a release. He very calmly observed, “You’ve done this before. It’s where you’re supposed to go and you know that.” The heavy implication was the reality I have known in my heart since I was a child: I don’t belong in Texas. I just don’t. As big and wide as that sky is, it is somehow not big enough. And that’s okay. Choosing to move 1,800 miles away (and maybe eventually across an ocean) is not the choice to abandon relationships there. It is simply a selection of paths and this one carries me further away. It rips my heart out because I absolutely need those souls in my life and the more frequently, the better. But I also do not want to limit myself to a radius. The idea that the average person lives within a fifty mile radius where they are born is completely disconcerting and suffocating to me. Sometimes better opportunities lie outside of our radius but we feel safer within that space. (I acknowledge that sometimes the opportunities are not better or that the decision to stay is not always personal security, but those are two things that I am not willing to risk). So here I am. On this path. And today the music and lyrics of IO sang over me a proclamation…
Thursday through Sunday were spent sorting, packing, and cleaning our entire apartment. Thanks to some last minute help we were actually out by 10:30 (of course not to bed until midnight). I am still sore from all that work, but I am glad it is done. While we did actually get out, we are not finished with our list. Lately, I've been feeling pretty out of it and it is definitely due to lack of sleep. I am torn between rest and my to-do list, knowing neither can be satisfied with this week's schedule of working, trying to schedule time with friends, hanging out with my family, plus all of the other things bound to arise like laundry, repacking, planning, etc.
The busy-ness (busyness, business, bizness) has continued to be my shelter from that feeling of leaving... again. It is an emotionally tense place to live, but I have not found another solution. I just need time to slow down (or maybe speed up?). I want it to be over, I want it to never come. I want to drive away, I want to stay forever. I have so much to do, I just want to relax. I reside in that comma.
New discoveries:
I find that I have to psyche myself up for infinite moments. Like, driving down the road is just a commute unless you turn on your favorite music, light up, and roll down the windows even though it is raining. Suddenly something routine becomes rejuvenating.
Ben and Jerry's "Everything But The..." is my new favorite comfort food.
I am finding that I like to be "necessary". Self-esteem issue? Maybe. I'm working on it.
Sometimes friendship grow with change and sometimes they fade. Mostly though, relationship change with change. The dynamic that worked in the past may not continue, but it can still be beautiful.
We are moving forward. Days are dragging on, but somehow weeks are flying by. We are down to eighteen days remaining. Eighteen. I just cannot believe how close it is.
It has been an overwhelming few months, but I am starting to see the finish lines to what has been eating my time, energy, and attention. Knowing that there are reasonable chunks of tasks that can be completed and will be coming to a close brings a lot of peace of mind. Monday signals the end of my school year. The following Sunday is the Official Move Out Day. The weekend after that is my last day of work at GBBC and Hunter's graduation. And two days later, we're leaving.
Just like that. Leaving.
My emotions are all over the place but my busyness has helped me stay distracted from that topsy-turvy nervousness and the sadness at leaving my family behind again. Family is the hardest group of people to stay with and the hardest people to leave. My sight is becoming blurry with stinging, salty tears as I type this, particularly thinking of leaving my siblings behind because as we grow up, we change so much and so quickly. The year I was gone it seemed that all of them became different people. I just do not know how to miss those moments in their lives and be okay with it.
I'm talking about the moments that make you who you are: when you tell a bad decision no, or say yes to a mistake and grow from it, or have the best night laughing with friends (the kind you remember for always), or any number of those times when you feel "infinite" and it becomes what molds your memories. So many people do not get to love their siblings the way I love mine. When I say I would die for them, there is no hesitation in my heart that I would give every last thing I have to save them, help them, grow them. Each is such a unique person with incredible talent, beauty, and destiny. And if you've met them even once, even briefly, you know that too. How do I just get in a car and drive away? How do I move forward with my life, knowing that they are moving forward with theirs and it might not be in a parallel direction anymore?
As long as I have known these four incredible people, we have all been moving in the same direction: up. We were growing up, from one grade to the next, from single digits to double digits, middle school to high school, up clothes sizes... just up. But I hit it first: that place where things are not moving "up" so much as across. Getting older is leveling out just a bit and I am making choices for my life that move me out and forward. Hunter is beginning to do the same and now every other year, so will each of the others. So as we move out and forward, can we still be together? Can we still be connected? Can we avoid the awkward quiet and fumbling for conversation that comes between normal friends after extended time apart? Can we still be involved and interact without having that deathly distance kill the intimate camaraderie that is so unexplainable and so rare? I hope so. God, with all my heart, I hope so. Because these are the people I love the most and I know my life would fade so quickly and lose so much color if something were to tear us apart.
There it is. That's the hardest thing about leaving. I feel like I am abandoning them and it's hard not to hate myself for it. It's not comforting to be told that it will "all be okay", that I have to go my own direction because it's "natural" and "healthy," that our relationships will be fine, etcetera etcetera. I'm supposed to be here. I'm their older sister who has done her very best to love them, protect them, and encourage them amidst her own chaotic learning. I have made mistakes, but I do not love them any less or want to be away from them anymore.
I will be okay. I know I will because I have been before. But today it just hit me and my independence tastes more bitter than sweet through these thoughts.
{So if any of you darlings read this, I love you. I love you so very much, with all my heart, and I always will. I'm here for you no matter what, no matter when. Forever. -Your Sister}
