Tuesday Morning Musings

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.