Hospitals, Cake, and Stories

After a long day of babysitting, I came home and ate a piece of cake.

It was delicious.

Two days spent trying to figure out the next step — hospitals are scary, but every single one of the doctors and nurses was kind. They took care of me. Robert kept asking me if I was okay, if I was comfortable. It was strange when he said, “Nice to meet you,” and I realized that I’d never see this man again, after two hours of him almost holding my hand.

Still no idea, so today I went back to work and ate cake.

[The little girl I watch makes up songs and stories like it’s her job. Example:

Pre-schooler: My boyfriend’s the greatest.

Me: Really? What makes him the greatest?

Pre-schooler: He gives me popcorn every day.

If only it were that simple. ]

[Notes from The Student, Part 3]

[train thoughts]

That idea of “do not throw your pearls before swine” keeps running through my head. Maybe it also means that we should be careful who we tell our deepest thoughts to. Maybe we should guard ourselves – not open ourselves up too much to people we call friends, but who time and time again prove less than trustworthy.

K. says we’re dreamers. We think and dream and hope big. And that’s not necessarily bad, but that it could (and probably is) a large part of why we are so often unsatisfied. See the less-than-perfect sides of even our biggest blessings. Maybe dreamers are more likely to be unsatisfied than concrete people.

G. is funny, clever, gets things and people quickly. But there’s not a lot of grace in her. What’s the point of knowledge – even a shade of wisdom – if you don’t have grace? I see too much of myself – of how I could be.

[we don’t have to be all things for all people. we are finite. there is actually a lot of peace in that.]

[that was the only thing about last night; i looked around while i was dancing and just saw so much desperation. it was gross and sad at the same time.]

“I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts.” -Psalm 119:45

So seeking after the Lord’s precepts – His laws, His will – is what brings freedom. Structure brings freedom. So counter-intuitive to how I think.

[overheard on the subway: “i went to zara and spent $700 on, like, nothing.”]

Gave a guy 50 cents. Said he needed $2 to get home, but I didn’t have $2 (literally, I did not have it). Can I have just $2? No, I don’t have $2. Can I have all your change? No, you can have 50 cents. Did I just help his drug addiction? Maybe. I don’t know. Where in the Bible does it say, “make sure they use your money wisely”?

[i keep thinking about M. maybe because i realized i’m older than he’ll ever be – i’ve already been given more time. i’m not sure. maybe i should email his mom, tell her we still think about him. tell her a story where he’s the young hero, showing me how to laugh, how to flirt, how to smile into twinkly, mischievous eyes.]

Marriage is such an excluding relationship. When others get married, you are eternally on the outside. Weird.

Don’t reduce your life to only one passion.

[in thinking about “Legends of the Fall” and how grotesque all the characters are; they could have lived beautiful lives, but instead they chose selfishness and reduced themselves to one passion, flattening themselves.]

A lot for a day, and yet only a piece of it.

Kinship with Strangers

I am already past the halfway-point of my TEFL course, and I can’t believe it.

Mostly because that means the time of decisions is feeling terribly close.

I was hashing it out with someone (my mother? myself? i can’t remember), and I realized that I don’t like this making of decisions. It’s not that I’m indecisive – that is far from any trait I possess – it’s that I hate the idea of being boxed in a year down the road by a choice I make now.

What if something better comes along?
Or if not better, at least different?

What if I choose something and its permanence becomes a chain on my ankle?

I read this article today on Image.org, and despite the differences in our circumstances, the woman sounds scarily like myself at times. She’s scared of making decisions, too, and actually has put off long-term decisions for 22 years.

It seems even people nearly twice my age have the same thoughts.

A Tough Decision

A lot of things get decided on walks.

Maybe it’s being outside, swinging your arms, the fast change of scenery as you process. I think it has a lot to do with the combining of mind and body – thought and motion.

Last night, I decided not to take a job.

I was so excited about it. The email came, siren-calling me to a job that I could actually see myself doing. A job that would use so many of the skills I’d acquired in college, but that I knew would challenge me, too. A job that would require the huge move I’d been longing for.

But this same job paid nothing. Nothing. And on top of that, there is a mysterious surgery looming in my future. I’ve been in denial for a few weeks now, but something is coming. Even in my scared state, I actually considered moving halfway across the country to a place where I know no one. I’ll be fine. It won’t REALLY take me six months to recover. Please. This is the twenty-first century.

Last night, I walked quickly beside a dear friend. We went up steep hills (reminding me of my treacherous experience with Philosopher’s Weg in Heidelberg, Germany…too much huffing and puffing for much philosophizing on my part!). We crossed busy streets and were nearly run over by crazed cyclists. All the while, talking incessantly as I tried to convince her and convince myself that it wasn’t crazy. It wasn’t crazy to pick up my life a few weeks after major surgery and move far, far away. It wasn’t crazy to make less money than I needed to pay back my student loans. It wasn’t crazy to think that running away would make me happy.

I wonder what passers-by thought, seeing two slightly-agitated young women, mouths unable to pause long enough to think.

Before we got back to her cozy apartment, I knew the answer.

No job.

No big move.

No adventure.

At least, not the adventure I’d been sure of. Trusting that God knows what I need. Having the faith to let it go, the thing I was holding on to so dearly that I was willing to overlook some huge obstacles. Praying that He would help me to trust Him more. Who knows? Maybe my recovery time will be like lightning, and I’ll find myself on the shores of some distant land, teaching English and sipping a deliciously strong drink. Or maybe I’ll hit my stride as a tea marketer, getting account after account of bridal favors. Or perhaps I will FINALLY find a way to put into words everything that’s been building building inside me.

I think I’ll start with a new flock of chicks. They’re pretty cute.

DSC00297

[The triumphant photo after climbing Mount Untersberg. There’s no better feeling in the world.]

Pride

Image

I haven’t seen a day like this in a long time. I even put the top down in my car – March 13th – and flew down the highway with my shades on. Sometimes I can’t believe the way the sun glints off the trees.

But two days ago, it was not so lovely. Inside or out. Wound up in myself and disappointments, I forgot how beautiful it is.

When it’s warm

when the sun heats the top of my head

when I wake up to see a cardinal perched in a pear tree (yes, a pear tree)

when I can hear the bees waking up

when I sip strong coffee in the early morning

when the light turns pink in the evening.

I forget a lot of things when all I can see are my shortcomings. Or my circumstances. One thing I realized the other day is that pride has two faces. Yes, there’s that well-recognized cocky attitude, with a haughty look and a sharp, appraising tongue. But then there’s the other side. The side that says:

I’m not good enough. I’m ugly. I’m stupid. What did I think I was worth? 

This sounded like humility to me at first, in my confused mind. Then I realized it’s just pride’s other face; if I really think all those things, then I think that I, the core of me, deserves more. That these circumstances aren’t good enough. That I’m not smart enough because I as a created being should be smarter. I’m not as pretty as I deserve to be.

Somehow, in this bright yellow light, sitting at my kitchen table, I am comforted by this realization. Another piece of the puzzle. Oswald Chambers says that the Christian fails because she puts more store in her own holiness than she does in building the kingdom, in proclaiming Christ’s redemption.

That is not how I want to be.

My holiness should not be my focal point, as odd as that sounds.

It should be a byproduct of my total devotion to my God.

And where does this leave me? At the kitchen table, with my family working around me, breathing deeply the spring air. It leaves me asking with (mercifully) a little less urgency, Where am I going?

I don’t always feel this way, but…

I spent a lot of time in the car today, driving my Gramma back home, and I remembered writing an essay my senior year of college. It flowed out of me unbidden — the paper had started as a funny exploration of homeschooling and turned into a kind of melancholy look at the emerging adult. Or, at least, THIS emerging adult. And then I thought about all the movies I’ve watched, all the books I’ve read, and I realized there are two kinds of girls: the girls who go off on their grand adventures, traveling the world, au pairing, writing, singing, meeting dashing young foreigners with crooked smiles and laughs in their eyes, cooking, discovering cures for deadly diseases, helping orphans, drinking too much and smoking. There’s a plethora of aspects of this same girl — the girl who goes for it.

And then there’s the other kind of girl: the girl who goes home. There really aren’t that many different colors of this girl. She’s pretty much the same wherever she is. She sometimes has as many dreams as the girl who leaves, but she lacks a certain something. Maybe it’s guts. Maybe it’s drive. Maybe it’s self-confidence. She probably knits and her friends probably think of her as very sweet, when they think of her at all. She stays home and wonders what all the other girls are doing out there. And she blogs about it.

And next week?

Yesterday I met a family about babysitting. They live in the next town over in a nice house on a hill — three kids, a dog, pretty much what you’d imagine. The mom was really nice: energetic, happy, easy to talk to. The youngest, a daughter, sat at the table with us the whole time, not saying a word. Her cropped blonde head just went back and forth between us, watching.

And as much as I tried to avoid it, the question, “So, what do you hope to do?” came up, and I was obliged to give some sort of answer. At first I was going to talk about publishing. Because it’s easy. Because it’s something people can wrap their minds around. But I can’t keep lying to everyone. Too much alone time. Too much paperwork. So I was honest.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I love writing, but I don’t think I want that to be my main source of income. I’ve been thinking about getting certified to teach English as a foreign language.”

This was true. I’ve been doing research online about potential programs, different places to study, different job possibilities once I’m done.

“Oh, that sounds interesting!” she said.

Good. I came up with the right answer. But the thing is, that’s just what I’m thinking about this week. This week I emailed a friend in New York, one of my best friends, asking to let me stay with her while I studied my own language. To paraphrase Anne of Green Gables, I soared up on the wings of anticipation – fast-paced days in the big city, meeting people from all over the world, eating out at little hole-in-the-wall diners tourists never find, writing in a nook in the public library – and then thudded right back down when my friend said that wouldn’t work.

Who knows what my answer will be next week?!

Living a Fairy Tale

“You live a fairy tale, you know,” my first boyfriend said to me. We were driving somewhere in his toyota station wagon, and I was telling him stories about growing up. I can’t remember what it was – maybe it was that I took horseback riding lessons, or maybe it was that we used to spend a week every summer on a lake in Maine – but whatever it was, I guess it made my childhood sound pretty idyllic.

“What do you mean?” I knew I’d had a good life, that there were beautiful moments of laughing til my sides hurt, of roping my brothers, sister, and cousins into playing “Little House on the Prairie,” and of boisterous family holidays where sometimes it was hard to hear anything that was going on. “Everything’s always been so easy for you,” he said, not looking at me. “Everything was so easy.”

What he didn’t see though, was that while things looked easy, there is always more. I think back on that afternoon in his car, and I wonder what my life looks like from the outside now. Graduating in May was a huge change, and I’ve made some choices I really didn’t want to make: I moved back home with loving parents and a great younger brother, but sacrificed living with friends and independence. I took a few part-time jobs because I get bored out of my mind working at a desk, doing the same thing day to day. But this leaves me with uncertain hours, a smaller income, and more than anything the feeling that I’m not accomplishing much.

As I begin to piece together what my life will look like, I balance between learning patience and practicing action. I am much more prone to act than I am to wait; I see a problem, a challenge, a choice, and I want to conquer it. Maybe this period of waiting, of patience, of trust, is necessary to shape me more finely. But it’s really uncomfortable.

“Everything’s always been easy for you.” Those words echo in my head, making me feel an odd mix of resentment and un-deserved privilege.

I step back and see the blessings, and I am grateful. I look forward to sharing the fairy tale life, even if it isn’t always such a fairy tale.

<a href=”http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/4842253/?claim=2xnuamzgzjx”>Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>