The past year and a half has been one of the most exciting
and beautiful of my life. In gas station parking lots, on pew kneelers in a
catholic cathedral, and in a copse of trees awash in ashy failure, I’ve begun
to discover just what it means to belong to another human, and to be entrusted
with a human soul. My faith has been challenged more directly and more
ambitiously than ever before, and has continually emerged from battle refreshed
and renewed.
Through the record-setting heat of last summer and into the
heavy woolen winter, I worked two jobs, averaging more than 45 hours a week,
and managed to take a full load of courses more intellectually ambitious than
any previous semester of my collegiate career. In order to complete projects
and study for exams, I was frequently obliged to burn the midnight oil until
relentless daylight seared my irises, already dyed pink by contact lens
irritation.
And in January, I stumbled out of it with a 3.85 cumulative
GPA, and onto a plane. From January to May, five of my best friends and I
rampaged across the South American continent in an ancient station-wagon,
taking life as it came.
I came home, swept back into my arms a woman for whom the
adjective ‘incomparable’ was personally crafted, slid a ring onto her finger
and set a date.
I say this not to toot my own horn. Goodness knows there are
resoundingly more popular venues for torn-tootling than this blog. I say it to give myself perspective: my life
is awesome.
I say this because through all of it, I have been
consistently distracted. I let the most
miniscule uncertainty or tension in a friendship upend my world. I let my
perfectionism become writer’s block, and my writer’s block become a monkey. The
monkey, suffering no similar creative blockage, has purchased a saddle and become
a relatively nimble horseman at my expense, since.
I’ve known, throughout, that my life is awesome.
But somehow, despite maintaining a mostly-proper outlook of
the big things, I’ve allowed myself to lose the intense gratitude of the
remarkably blessed.
This evening, due in part to John Wayne, King of the Apes,
and some minor unpleasantness that has arisen regarding my employment, I began
to compose a sad, sad, song.
No worries, I shan't be sharing.
No worries, I shan't be sharing.
Anyway, the upshot was something along the lines of the endless
endurance required to live, and the way in which we all get stretched out
further than possible, until God—having unfairly extended our rubber-band souls
to the point where the gritty grains begin to show—lets us snap back together. Fulfilling
my role of Faithless Israelite 1, I was on the point of expressing doubt as to
whether He was ever going to stop stretching.
And then it hit me like a musket-ball between the eyes. An
archaic truth, unearthed in millennia past, and a personal mantra for me since
roughly my twelfth year of existence: it’s all in your attitude. It’s all in
perspective.
It’s odd to me that I’ve been so close to right this whole
time, all the while allowing a pessimistic and thoroughly unindomitable frame
of mind to overwhelm the sunniness in which my soul was made to bask. It leaves
me more than a little embarrassed, let me tell you.
It also fills me with gratitude that a certain Someone was
willing to extend the revelation while I was soggily sobbing in verse form.
And finally, it allows me to repeat my epiphany for your
benefit, and for my own when the time to be reminded comes again: how good or
bad your life is is not entirely in your control all the time, but most of the
time, it is. And when the skies seem black, and cares attack, and you essay to
count your blessings….Count ‘em, count ‘em, count ‘em. And put some soul into
it.
