note before reading: I’m venturing to blog more this year, but I will do so with terrible spelling and grammar issues for the fact that my life is papers, and for this I just don’t want to care nor worry about bad english form. because for this…it is not important to me.
I moved my school work section off my bed and to my desk this week. This in of itself is quite a feat and often not a change I make until well into the last week before my papers are due. But I guess with my Senior Seminar paper kind of holding my graduation in its hand and being due far before finals, I have made this grand semester move at the start of the year. A good sign or a bad sign I have yet to decide. The depression, which usually settles in for permanent residence about a month and a half into school, has also brought itself around early. I’m almost one hundred percent sure that this change has no correlation with the move from bed to desk. Though I can’t help but wish it did. That is easily solved by moving a few books to my bedside and my computer onto a pillow.
Trapped by snow and a weekend I have poured myself into my homework. You know reading one more depressing classic novel and doing pounds of research. In every break I take, where I am able to stand about and view the beauty of God’s creation, I have found I do so with the most impossible happy sadness. Maybe this is better described as content sadness. I look out my window (which I have completely uncovered–yet another complete abnormality, of which rarely happens til spring rains fall) and watch the huge snow flake fall on my undisturbed backyard. I even spent 15 minutes just watching my neighbors dog frolic through the snow. Sometimes I’ve caught myself opening the window to here the snow fall (yes I contend it has a sound, just as it has this distinct smell.) Anyway I digress…when I watch these flake float back and forth I was completely sad, but not heavy. I don’t know, maybe this year as I watch the snow fall God is echoing back my sadness for me. I can’t seem to expedite the blues away, but I feel a whole lot less alone when I watch that snow fall. Intriguingly it’s the silence and the ability to stand alone and hear snow fall which causes me to not feel alone. Yes, I’m not quite sure what that means–or says about me for that matter.
I don’t for a second doubt my choices in the last month and few days change…but it’s a weird sensation of falling back into a routine, that should seem so familiar, but everything about it screams that it’s completely inexperienced before. Maybe it’s the way everything is occurring earlier or faster. Maybe it’s the fact that in 112 days I will finally be done with this bothersome last four years. A degree in hand to please the masses and a free ticket to follow my dreams. But as I clutch my hot cup of Mint tea, I am assaulted by two different ideas running in a delicate dance. First I look at this cup and thing of my excitement of purchasing it last year, and I can be taken back to my kitchen of last year and the memories there. I place it down on the small plate of which I have inherited from my Grandma Bowen. I quickly think, tomorrow is dreaded Sunday, a day of which I still can’t face without a sad memory that never again will I sit at her table and eat her amazing cooking. Familiar sadness sinks deep into my core and nestles close to the already consistent ache. But as these memories assail me I am also bending under the weight of yet another, even stranger phenomena. That this moment for some reason has great meaning. I have been hit by this feeling over and over and over again the last week. I do something so insignificant and I feel the weight of this has some deep meaning or that it should.
For example, I dropped off my graduation packet earlier this week. Amidst the chaos of starting classes plus the assault of inches of snow I gladly turned in the correct papers to get me out of here. This should be a momentous event I remember thinking, but I felt nothing. I could have cared less. But later that day when I sat down in the Hive to grab a quick snack I felt the weight of it being a significant moment. I stared around the room, very few faces were familiar. I ate a good ole chicken patty sandwich and I continued to feel a deep pressure of meaning I couldn’t quite grasp. This week has very much been categorized in my head as a very alone one. I moved to classes quietly by myself, I sat through classes fairly quietly by myself. I spent hours alone doing my shopping tasks, school preparations, my homework–all alone. I sat in chapel repeatedly by myself surrounded by hundreds. But most of this time, I never once felt the weight of loneliness, instead I felt as if God was saying—see this is what I’m showing you. Listen close. Except, I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to be hearing…I can’t help but sit alone with my thoughts and I know this is exactly where I should be, where I needed to be this weekend. And that I think is what scares me the most. The fact that I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be, the fact that things are definitely being directed at me, but yet I can’t quite figure out what all of this means. So I take another sip of my tea, I spend a few more minutes watching the snow fall, and then I wrap myself back up in my grandma’s quilt, let the hurt settle back into its home and go back to my massive amounts of reading.
