Round trip
Last night I returned from Wheaton. Coming home was something of a surreal process. The tiny threads that I'd spun during my 48 hour visit unraveled again as I rode in the back seat to the airport and made my way to A18. This always happens, but somehow it never fails to catch me off guard. I believed that this time would be easier: Fewer people left to see means fewer goodbyes, but somehow it doesn't work that way. There's a cost to returning, more significant than the $108.18 Southwest charges for its services.
Distance has a marvelous way of creating perspective. 600 miles takes only 1 hour 25 minutes gate-to-gate, but somehow it's enough. I hear with envy of K's dream of moving to NY and becoming a freelance author. G's art moves me to silence and wonder. The posters for H's new production prompt significant self-criticism. Have I done anything with myself in the last two years? J reminds me of other things, too. And so I return to Kansas, both shaken and stirred, frustrated with my life and frustrated with my frustration. Artists create, do they not? Writers write. Dancers dance. Readers read. I would claim to be many of these things, yet the actions denoting each are significantly and consistently absent from my life. I am an imposter, riding on the faded coattails of my collegiate enterprise and creativity.
When I was in third grade, I memorized MLK Jr's famous speech: "I have a dream that one day..." I used to tell people that I wanted to be a rocket scientist, a lawyer, an English professor. Truth be told, I never wanted to be any of those things, but I needed something to tell them when asked. Faulkner, it turns out, was right afterall: Some words are merely shapes to fill a lack. The older I get and the more honest I become, the more glaringly that lack asserts itself. I have no "dream that one day..."; I have merely memorized the dreams of others. My father wants to be a muscician and filmmaker. My sister wants to write and open a bakery. L is off to graduate school. R is an actor. C will be a wife and mother. It's not so much that I'm unhappy with my current life as much as that I despise not knowing what that life should be. (This is, of course, beyond the rather self-evident directive to "Love God and make him known.") I am tired of watching everyone else follow their dreams. I am tired of not having a dream. And I am tired of being too lazy to find it.
An old friend sent me an out-of-the-blue email last year. "Are you happy?" he asked. I wasn't sure how to reply. But what is happiness, anyway? And how is that different from contentment? Perhaps contentment is a choice, a decision one makes to truly BE where one IS. It's about being present, about widening one's stance by an extra foot and saying, "Yes, this is where I will stand." Does contentment necessarily lead to happiness? Possibly, but I'm afraid to give it a fair chance. Contentment seems a bit too close to resignation, to settling. If I agree to be content, I may get too comfortable. I may stay here forever. Is that really such a bad thing?
To the bright east she flies, / Brothers of Paradise / Remit her home, / Without a change of wings, / Or Love's convenient things, / Enticed to come. / Fashioning what she is, / Fathoming what she was, / We deem we dream — / And that dissolves the days / Through which existence strays / Homeless at home.
--Emily Dickinson
No flying away now. There is work to be done.
posted by bp @ 1:17 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
This was an example of a writer writing, was it not. I read it and enjoyed it. Insightful and inspiring! "I want more" Oliver Twist
It has taken me how many months to finally remember to check up on your blog and read the "new" posting? Bad friend points.
But about you.... Oh, BP, I have always admired your unwillingness to let yourself "off the hook" on the things where you know you're settling or playing it too safe. You put us all to shame in that regard.
After reading your words, I can't help but remember how frequently we talked about "living in the question" at AT and in our apt. It always sounded nice, but only recently have I been able to buy into the idea when reading Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet."
He writes: "You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
I think you are doing a fine job of living in the question. Though the dream may be unnamed, it is surely in you--and with every experience, every risk taken, every prayer surrendered, you are living it into being. Someday, you will know it well enough to name it, but that day is not today, and that's just the way it should be.
-LC
People ask what I want to do with my math degree all the time; more specifically they ask, "what do you want to do with that, teach?". I say, "yes" or "it's a possibility", even though I don't really think that's what I want to do. I really think that even if you don't have some impressive 10-year plan in action, that does not diminish the beauty of making the most of the present: being there for people because you're not involved so much in everything. At least that's my excuse for my lack of a long term goal.
Miss dancing though...
~M aka former suitemate and dance buddy
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