I’ve been meaning
to write something for a while now. I tried numerous times before, but either I
(or my writing) was never focused enough. This morning, however, I was sitting
out on our back porch because I was drawn early out of bed by unknown forces. I
sat for a while listening to the peaceful birds, watching the peaceful lake and
feeling inside similar to a tornado of hummingbirds. My mind would not settle
on any one thing but hopped from one flower-thought to another, leaving
destruction in the wake. I began to write to relieve some pressure and
something okay-ish emerged.
It went like this:
I am trying to sit
here on the porch and slow down. But I am freaking out inside. My mind is on
all the things I want—“need” to be doing. Clean
the house, travel, spend time with family, read the many books lying around my
room, organize my stuff, get my head together, FIGURE IT OUT. That last one
is the biggest, the most difficult. Figure out where I’m going, what I’m doing,
why I feel this or that . . . Understand more, discover more.
Part of the reason
being nineteen is so scary is that I’m old enough to start “figuring out” what
to believe, what’s right and true. But I’m also young enough to keep changing
and reinventing and redefining my not-so-solid beliefs, values and ideals.
That’s not even
the scariest part, though. The scariest part is that when I was nine, I was
sure that by now things would be much clearer. Things would be worked out and,
I would know exactly what to do, who to choose, which path to take.
But in reality I
don’t even know where I’m walking, and even if there were road signs, I
probably wouldn’t know how to read them. The scariest part is looking ahead and
realizing if I live as I intend to, I will need to keep redefining my ideas so
that they don’t get dusty and make people sneeze. Yes, I will have a core of
beliefs that remain constant, but mostly my ideas about “the way things are”
will constantly be changing. That means I will probably feel nineteen at
twenty-nine, at thirty-nine and probably even ninety-nine. (Maybe I’ll have it
figured out by one hundred.)
From there, I have
a set of choices.
One choice is to
descend into a steady stream of hopelessness; nothing will ever change. Another
choice is to turn to a false wall. Pour cement over the things I think I know
and don’t let anyone tell me that I am wrong.
The choice I hope
I always choose is mostly an option because of what I do believe. My belief in God helps me to feel secure in the
knowledge that I will never be sure, not really. Although I try to figure God
out, he is constantly growing out of the cardboard box I try to tuck Him into.
My final choice is that I could move forward. I could open myself up to not
knowing yet, not understanding just now. Then I could be okay with that.
Perhaps this is
not applicable to anyone else, and this is simply a diary entry born from a
phase in my life. I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that I’m not the only
one who doesn’t know what I am doing, and I for one will probably never figure
it out. Sometimes knowing someone else doesn’t have life all sorted out either
is a priceless comfort. So I will take what I have—the lake, the birds, the
peace—and be okay.
