several learned things

The only thing to do, when there is yet to be no sense of news or spark of change, is to keep going anyway. The moment the discouragement prompts you to give up is the exact time to brush it off, and push on. 


This entry is only to briefly outline the few things I have found myself learning this week; pretty tough lessons in all, but ones I will learn to cherish I am sure, some later rather than sooner. 


The first, and one I am oh-so-blessed to daily realize, is the little ways we can be shown support by the people we love. Whether that is the mention of our names, the reminder that they are thinking of us, or the ability they have to make us laugh, even at the cursed hour of 4 am, when we are on our ways to the work we dread: 


A picture message received to me from my cute Colin, of an excerpt from a coffee enthusiast's blog called My Daily Coffee. The blogger, Mike, photo-documents each time he enjoys (or despises) an espresso, from specialty shops to airport terminals. My favorite truth so far being this:

Oh, Mike is funny. And he is right. And though LAX is surely not among the reasons why, I have started to miss Los Angeles. 


Another small lesson comes from the change (or lack of change) we can feel with each passing day, how one minute everything comes rushing back as no different than it was ten years ago, that we are the same people, that we haven't learned a thing, that we haven't grown at all, that the world has turned on its tilt and we have stood still on it. Still, despite everything, despite what feels inflexibly invariable, I came across a funny picture while scanning through old albums. Me, on my sixteenth birthday (the sweetness of it debatable), coming from my very first job (of course, at a coffee shop, the enterprise that seems to have temporarily sealed my fate), wearing the same awful pants that I wore to my current job, up until they were recently deemed anti-dress-code.

Oh, little girl. If you only knew now how much you would now love and now ache. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't recognize this person anymore, any more than she might recognize me. But the irony of it killed me only slightly, and only in the best possible way. 


The last lesson worth mentioning, and probably the biggest, comes from the book I just started reading by Lauren F. Winner called Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis. I know, I know. It sounds self-helpy, as it must, but the fact is any and all books are of self-help to me. I can learn almost anything, the most surprising of things, I can find a connection or a truth or meaning in those pages, in any pages: I can be reaffirmed, reminded, challenged, hung to dry, brought to tears. This book in particular, however, was brought to me in a much more mysterious way, in a moment I can't explain, as it practically fell from the shelf to my hands. 


Winner's caustic sense of faith begins to falter, more or less, when she realizes her marriage is failing. It's not a memoir, she states openly. Rather, it is an admittance, it is a struggle penned by honesty, and one she hopes will resonate with others feeling the same sense of loss: loss of self, loss of direction, loss of meaning of it all. Only several chapters in, I find myself constantly thinking, I get that, Lauren. I feel that all the time. I think, in a way, eventually, we all do. 


Still with much farther to go, in numbers of pages and otherwise, so far her words have found their way in and made my heart break, not only with a common sadness but with an understanding, with the relief that someone else has felt this way before. Hearing it (or reading it) has brought me a reassurance in which I had lost belief. 

"Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze." 

I don't know what it means, always, to nurture our faith, to remind ourselves that better things come, to choose perseverance, to stand strong, to think positively, to focus on our blessings rather than our burdens. All in all, I am not the best at any of these things. But I have been grateful for the written reminder to try, and the small joy of yet another book I can't bring myself to put down. 


That being said, all things are as they were a week ago. I am ungratefully employed and I am on the search, today and every day, until I find the door hanging open, just wide enough, to let me in. I have a feeling, a rather strong one, that moments such as these, will be the ones to carry me through.