It’s that time of year when change can almost seem like a good thing. I don’t know where you are in your life, but I am about to graduate from college for the second time and start a graduate school program for the first time. There are a million assignments due between now and then, but I am starting to really feel graduation coming, and along with it, change.
Although my life has never been a smooth flowing stream of predictability, the past few years have been a total trip. I’d quote Grateful Dead here, but mine has been a different kind of trip. Long and strange, yes, but not drug-induced. Life is crazy enough on its own, and I have found that the more I pursue my passions, the more surreal it gets. Meaning runs deeper; my successes have me flying with the geese in the clouds, while my discouragements send me careening downward, sometimes so low I have to immediately process my emotions with a friend or on the blank pages of my writing book.
There are times in life when it is only about survival.
I am nervous about my future: do I have what it takes to be an advanced scholar? The state of the world adds to my uneasy feeling deep inside, but if it is any consolation things have always been in turmoil somewhere. Of course, that knowledge doesn’t help, but it does make me wonder how humans continue to cope. Lastly, as I go through my life I find myself wishing over and over again that some changes would never happen: sickness, pain, cruelty and the heartache they cause. But they do happen, I don’t have to tell you that, and the only thing that seems to alleviate the horror is the kindness and love that we can offer each other.
There are times in life when you accept change because it’s already happening to you.
I saw determined shoots of green grass as I walked to my car this morning and my heart leaped. The Midwestern winters are so long that it can take almost a month for people to really get that spring is here, and that after it will come summer. All of the sudden, the sun is shining down with sincere warmth instead of just being a placeholder until the real sun joins us again. It is hard not to feel a little more hope on these spring days, and while that hope might be an allusion, it doesn’t hurt to give in. I think Anne Frank may have said it best:
“When there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again."
