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.