Skip to main content

She Does Seminary: One Year In

Let's talk about how much life can change in a year. And yet, how little changes at the same time.

Yesterday, I celebrated a friend's 35th birthday. It's the fourth year that I've been a part of her life, and I have fond memories of eating cake and dancing with two other friends in her basement apartment in 2010, shortly after she moved to the city.

In some ways, my life hasn't changed much since then. I'm still here in Toronto. Still struggling to make ends meet. Still unsure of where my life is headed. But appearances can be deceiving, and I feel certain that these years have been important ones.

I started a nannying job that fall. Took care of two rambunctious boys for a year. Then spent a year and a half working for their mom's business. The whole time, I asked myself, What am I doing? Where am I headed? 

 It felt like nothing was happening.

And then a conversation I hardly remember, except for the sound of my own voice saying, "I'd love to go to school, but I can't. There's no way I could afford it." And Jesus' voice, saying, "You haven't even tried."

So I applied to one school. Got in. Quit my job. Started school, found another job, freelanced. Went into debt for the first time in my life.

Time keeps rolling. Life happens. A boy drops into my life, out of absolutely nowhere.

Now it's almost September again - I have never escaped the school-related re-start of the year - and I'm looking back and thinking about where I'm headed.

And I still don't know.
"I thought I'd be going into second year with more clarity, not less," I said earlier this week, "I feel even less certain of what I'm doing with my life, why I'm in school at all."
"It's part of your journey. You need to be there," he reassured me. And it's true. I do feel the need to be there. I just don't know why. 

But do we ever know why?

Allow me just a moment of philosophizing. Can we ever know what we're really doing or what the outcome of our decisions will be? Is it possible to say, "This. This is the purpose, the goal, the undeniable result."?

I don't think it is. I think we can't predict the future, and we can't control those around us (heck, sometimes we can't even control our own selves), and there's no way we can know how everything will work together to shape our lives.

I find this both terrifying and comforting. Terrifying, because I need something (someone) to trust in amidst all the unknowns. Comforting, because if I can't control the future, perhaps I can relax a little and enjoy the ride. Focus less on what my big career will be, and more on what I can learn right now. Less anxiety about networking, more attention on loving. Less pressure to perform, more freedom to be me.

That doesn't sound so bad. Maybe I can do year 2 after all...
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

Simone Weil time again! One of the essays in Waiting for God  is entitled "Forms of the Implicit Love of God." Her main argument is that before a soul has "direct contact" with God, there are three types of love that are implicitly  the love of God, though they seem to have a different explicit  object. That is, in loving X, you are really loving Y. (in this case, Y = God). As for the X of the equation, she lists: Love of neighbor  Love of the beauty of the world  Love of religious practices  and a special sidebar to Friendship “Each has the virtue of a sacrament,” she writes. Each of these loves is something to be respected, honoured, and understood both symbolically and concretely. On each page of this essay, I found myself underlining profound, challenging, and thought-provoking words. There's so much to consider that I've gone back several times, mulling it over and wondering how my life would look if I truly believed even half of these thi...
1 comment
Read more

I Like to Keep My Issues Drawn

It's Sunday night and I am multi-tasking. Paid some bills, catching up on free musical downloads from the past month, thinking about the mix-tape I need to make and planning my last assignment for writing class. Shortly, I will abandon the laptop to write my first draft by hand. But until then, I am thinking about music. This song played for me earlier this afternoon, as I attempted to nap. I woke up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 this morning, then lay in bed until 8 o'clock flipping sides and thinking about every part of my life that exists. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't quite restful either...This past month, I have spent a lot of time rebuffing lies and refusing to believe that the inside of my heart and mind can never change. I feel like Florence + The Machine 's song "Shake it Out" captures many of these feelings & thoughts. (addendum: is the line "I like to keep my issues strong or drawn ?" Lyrics sites have it as "stro...
2 comments
Read more

Esse - Czeslaw Milosz

I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st...
Post a Comment
Read more