Two Things

#1

I do this thing in life where I mull over the big things for a long time. Despite my many words, it's under the surface.  And then one day I surprise everyone (and myself) and make a decision seemingly out of nowhere.  And I'm committed and it happens very fast.  And it's good.   

That just happened.  I'm moving. 

In a few months I am moving.   Not quite yet.  But being like this again, doing life like this, made me once again think about how weird life is with its timing.  It stretches on and on, this apartment search, and then one day I find something, and I give these new people a deposit and they become my new landlords.   I have been thinking about moving. For a while.



Next February, I will trudge through snow in a new parking lot and have a different mailbox collecting my mail.  I will say hi to new neighbors.  The heft of my door will feel different, and home will be elsewhere.  For a while, the search for an apartment has been mildly depressing.  Nothing was right.  But then, quite suddenly, it was.  This is good advice for the rest of life too.  I just know something good happened and God made a space for it, and I just went with it. 

I wondered what I was really doing about halfway through today.  Did I really check everything out?   But the thing is, I did.   And then I had this gut instinct that said 'yes' when a lot of other things were saying 'no'.  And I saw that I had to go with it.  I feel quietly grateful to just know this.


#2

Here's something you might not know about my life.  People tell me very real things about their life in very casual day-to-day moments.    And it happens a lot.  In formal meetings.  On airplanes.  When I pass people at the grocery store.  Certainly in class.  My friend said it's because I tell people the truth about my life so they know they can tell me the truth about theirs.  Maybe so.  But every time it surprises me.  I do not wake up in the morning thinking that people I barely know will share their lives the way that they do.  (Is it something on my face?)  

The only reason I know this is because when I tell these stories, other people tell me they DON'T know that feeling.  At all.  And they wonder aloud why people tell me so much.  It makes me remember that I am always to be careful with the way I hold peoples' stories.

Enter this feeling once again the other day.  When I saw something like unrequited love, on the outside of my own life, like dialogue in a book.  These people paid attention to each other, even when they were talking to me.  And it was amazing to me...what they told me about the other, and how they said it.   She glowed.   And he had some sass about him.  The kind you want to see in a little old man...like he knew timing.  When to talk and when to be quiet.  These people were noticably both together and very separate all at once. 

Later, when I talked to the woman on my own, I made one small comment about what I find interesting about the world when people are single and available. And then I went back to what I was doing.  But she started talking aloud to herself about available people, and I felt like that was a good sign.  (Or a really terrible one.) 

?


One time when I was in high school, I read a book about two people who went in two different directions in life, and much later, came back to each other. (I think there are many books like this.) And of course in high school this was tragic and unimpressive to me. All those years. Why not go the course together?

But the other day, when it was right in front of me, I couldn't think like the girl I once was. And I couldn't see life like THEY could. I was somewhere else in the middle. But I remembered that book, and felt very suddenly that I was watching it be true.

You might be happy to know that it wasn't a sad thing to witness.  It was good and hopeful.  I only stood there, like the reader of a book, and had a conversation with them.  But I have NEVER seen something like that so obviously before.    It woke me up to life.



Things like this happen all the time.  (Maybe they happen in your life too.)   And so often I don't write about them.  But today I knew I could, so I just did.