It’s September, and I am floundering a little. This is my first autumn in I-don’t-know-how-many years that I haven’t been in school. College has started for my sister and the majority of my friends, and transitioning has been very hard. I feel like I have all this time lying around, seconds burning a hole in my pocket.
I am trying to remember something my pastor said: “Living things change.” This is happening because I am alive and because no one can stay in the same place forever. I think of a train station, one of those lovely one-fashioned ones with a yellowing ticket window and a polished bench. If I sat in that station and never boarded a train, I would get nowhere and see nothing.
Something else I’m holding in tandem with my “change is living” mantra is the thought that I am not not changing. I can’t stay in old patterns in a new day. I’m not left behind, and my growth does not stop just because I’m not in college anymore. My life is still vibrant and full, even in this time of waiting for what’s next. I have the ability to invest in basically whatever my creative little heart desires.
So I’ve begun building new patterns—reading books, learning languages, sending letters, and, of course, installing Zoo Tycoon on my laptop. I’ve started writing again. I’ve been able to submit some of my work to contests and magazines. I’ve started working out again. My whole body hates me for it, but at least I’ve started. I get to pour out my time to my family and my friends and my boyfriend. I can video chat pretty much whenever because I really don’t have anything pressing going on.
I’ve developed something that looks suspiciously like a routine, which is an incredibly foreign concept to me. I swear by spontaneity and get nervous when filling my time with concrete deadlines and to-do lists. But maybe it isn’t about taking up time. Maybe it’s about using it well.
It’s about looking at the life I have and seeing the value in it and mining that out. It’s about carrying intentionality out of the Christian-college-buzzword context and prioritizing community and learning and the people I love.
It’s about making these days count. And that’s freeing, not constricting.
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Something that has been part of my routine in the month of September is writing a poem every day. I enjoy writing poetry, but it does not come easily to me and I have never had much confidence in the genre. So it's both a challenge and a fun way to look at the world. This poem was inspired by a book I recently finished.
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The English Patient
She cups her hands
into the rain
and combs it into
her hair,
a gentle,
wafer-sweet-thin
picture of the simple pleasures,
the quiet getaways
that mark an
exhausted caregiver.
What must it be like
to stare into a charred
face
and still recognize it
as human?
She is a Good
Samaritan--
no, not so willing.
His donkey,
plodding on to
Jericho,
no braying complaints--
when she does raise
her voice, it is to
celebrate
all that life still holds.
Patient Hana,
would I have had your
courage?
Would I know the tenderness
of a book,
the dew on a spider's web,
the healing powers of
a ladybird,
a speck of sparking life
manifested on the cracked plain
of dying skin,
crawling towards home?
Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Vintage Books, 1996.