Scrapbooks

Me and Molly | Molly after grooming at Petcetera

For no reason in particular, I ended up flipping through my scrapbooks from the last few years tonight in my room with Molly. I think I must be (or used to be) one of the ultimate pack rats ever – my friends who have ever helped me pack (and this happens every time of course) can attest to this - and that I own an awful lot of pink things. So naturally, my scrapbooks are also packed, busting with odds and ends like bus tickets, to gifts like cards, which are saved and masterfully crafted into some part of a page with some kind of caption or explanation (you really do forget names and things after a few years!).

As I was rereading, I was thinking that we pack too much into our days, and handle too much information – from RSS feeds to news wires to podcasts – which causes us to not spend enough time processing what all this information means to us. We don’t sort through what is important and what really isn’t. That’s why I scrapbook, to relive and set down those memories. I feel that every time I do take the time to reflect, and to look at some pictures, I am amazed and I think – wow, I said/thought/did/wrote that? Because I had forgotten, forgotten how that thing/person was important, why it/they were so important.

Ever so often, certain pages also make you cringe, and I think that’s the best test to me. It tells whether or not I have fully dealt with an issue. There’s been a couple of realities that I am struggling to face right now, and I hope I will one day be able to look/read the entry in my scrapbook without cringing. Do you think it is normal to doubt, to ask all of those what if/should have questions? Because those are the questions that I ask myself, and that is what makes me cringe, the fear that I have made the wrong decision, and the fear that I will make a wrong one for tomorrow.

A person can’t really live in fear of regretting the past or in fear of the future now can they? Of course not, and this is the internal struggle I battle with these days. I guess I feel like I’m a bit stuck, and still thinking, thinking – while at the same time trying to be proactive and taking small steps and fight being apathetic and giving up. And there are bursts of passion and energy, but also followed by bounds of exhaustion and the want of doing nothing more than hiding and curling up in my bed with a book and my cat.

Perfect fall picture of Como Lake

But God is funny, and he makes the sun shine down on you on days you didn’t think its rays would ever make it through the cloudy skies (especially in Vancouver). Like today. And no matter how heavy your eye lids were when you woke up at 5am to go to work, or how sad you are when you replay in your head that awful conversation you had last night, it’ll be okay. And then you suddenly have this short but awesome conversation with a stranger on the bus (as it often happens), or a previously unknown colleague at work, or a favourite person of yours that you haven’t spoken to for some time. And life goes on. Maybe, just maybe, that’s how life moves, like a meandering river at times. Maybe it’s these seemingly little things that continue to propel us forward when you feel the weight of the world on your bony shoulders, and it feels as if the river has narrowed into a trickle. The rocks are so big and seemingly too immovable, but then you remember also that some other force had placed them there in the first place, so some other force, must be able to move them away again. Maybe God's teaching me to be patient.

Youthful Hubris

(somewhere off the highway in Saskatchewan)
There’s a funny part in Velvet Elvis where Rob Bell recounts the story of his encounter with his false, super self. A moment of ultimate decision when he decides to shot his “super pastor”, and to stop living like the perfect person everyone else sees, but he knows, isn’t him. Don’t we often stereotype people in this way in our daily lives, and even uplift these “superhumans” as role models, and ideals to be sought after?

I think I’ve killed my superself, but I am still trying to figure out and get used to living life as me – anna – and not as anna the super student, super friend, super volunteer, or super whatever. A preoccupation of mine in the last six months has been on finding out my ‘calling’ in life, my raison d’etre, my specific mission (or at least during this time) to live out this life of love, and what makes me cry is not knowing at all – what that is. To super anna, that doesn’t make sense, because I did all the right things: study hard, gain work experience, participate in the community, and even moving across the country when necessary. It disappoints myself when I can’t fully celebrate with others as I see them live out their passions, get engaged to the one they love, and just live life as it should be lived – fully. Indeed it is the ultimate example of youthful hubris when we demand and we feel as if we ought to know, as if the main character in the story of the world is us, when we are only, not even a week turned, twenty-two.

(4 nuggets for $1 CDN baby in Seattle)

I was having this conversation on Saturday with my friend Monica, and we were discussing this symptom of Generation Y to desire holistic development, where passion goes hand in hand with purpose and action, and reflection (at least for Arts grads) reigns deep into our consciousness. In Western Political thought, Augustine was the first theorist to bring in the introspective, inner consciousness, and it wasn’t until the 18^th and 19^th centuries where characters in romans began to gain complex inner selves. It kills me sometimes. And sometimes I wonder if life was simpler in the time of the nobility, where honour and shame were the virtue and vices, and people were judged by their actions and not thoughts.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Matt this past summer in Ottawa, in the kitchen of the LLC after a beer and walk (that’s all I can handle). As I was pouring out my sorrows to him, to comfort me, being the pragmatic, realistic person he is, he told me that statistically, Christians experience depression and anxiety at greater rates than other people of no faith or other faiths. Christians, by nature (or at least…they should be? LOL) after all, live knowing the weights of heaven and hell in their hands, on top of living everyday life. I see that. Sometimes, when we think too much perhaps, we get to a point where we feel like throwing our hands up in the air in despair, because everything seems hopeless – the environment, poverty, HIV/AIDS – and yet, not being able to, because we innately know, are given the faith to believe, that there is hope in this strange man named Jesus.

These days come, and today is one of them. And I continue to feel as if the world spins madly on, as I am standing in the middle of a busy, crowded street in New York City. Everyone is rushing around me to their respective destinations, and I am just looking, just wondering, just scared. And I also feel like the little two or three year old girl I was, trying to climb up on the piano bench to sit beside my older sister’s piano teacher, wanting desperately to learn how to play with my impossibly little fingers. I remember the piano teacher laughing and telling me gently that I was still a bit too little, and to wait until I was older to learn – and I feel like that’s what I’ve been told to do by God too. Wait.

(random chess pieces on board the deck on the Golden Princess...like life?)

For the first time, in a long time, I have stopped trying to try new things just for the sake of it, busting my butt to get ahead and noticed, and defining my worth by my success. It’s my hubris and ignorance to ever believe that achieving something – a degree, a boyfriend, an award - would bring me peace and contentment. Like I wrote before, nobody plans to win the Nobel Peace Prize, rather people live their lives and do their thing, and sometimes, rare as it is, they get recognized for it in a big way. And maybe this is my time to just live my life, recognizing that it is okay to do nothing sometimes - it is not laziness or a lack of drive but wisdom, that it is okay to be sad and to cry - it is not a sign of weakness but strength, and that it is okay to not know – for maybe, it is only when we admit our limits that they can be expanded and grow.

Breathe. Exhale. I think I need a good kick in the pants and wake up, read some good books, talk to people with ideas, and stop working for the government after these seven more months. Or, as one of my email buddies said to me (who I should really email and haven’t for a while)..remember to “haul ass, and milk every moment for every last drop of value. PEACE.”

(view of Vancouver harbour, steps from my building | my building, check out the Canadian flag)