My Bonsai Tree Life

The sky is overcast today, and the parking lot of this grocery store is a wet, shiny-black. It has rained nearly every day for the past week. I'm in the cafe, thinking, typing. I've been here a while, but I don't want to drive home yet because I can picture what will happen when I do. I will wander up to my cluttered bedroom and stare vacantly at my books, my bed, my laptop, trying to decide what to do with my evening. I won't feel particularly inclined to do any one thing. I may end up in the kitchen, looking for a snack I don't need or want—some hummus, perhaps, or a cookie—and I will feel aimless, because I am. The cafe is better than that, for now.

Sometimes, living at home and working a less-than-stimulating part-time job can make my life feel very small. Geographically it is small because I rarely travel beyond my triangle of necessity (work, home, the high school where I coach cross country). I spend a lot of time in my bedroom or rambling the wooded trails behind my house, kicking up fallen leaves. Socially, my life also feels small: though I have friends living all across the globe right now, I have exactly two in my own city. I can skype the day away, but that doesn't change the fact that I never leave the comfort of my own bed. I read, I write, I run, I work, I eat dinner with my parents—in short, I do little of interest. The most stimulating part of my day is the hour and a half I spend with the high school cross country team I help coach. My sphere of influence feels negligible.

I picture my life as a tiny dot, yellow, like a speck of pollen. It is small and insignificant against the grand backdrop of the world at large, floating in space, drifting.

Sometimes I wonder what it would take to make my life larger and and shinier and more important. I would need to move out of my parents' house, first of all, preferably to some exciting new city—Denver or Portland or Salt Lake. I would need a new job and a vibrant social life. I would need a Cause, something to fight for to make my existence feel purposeful. I would need to feel needed.

When I really think about it, though, I realize there is no guarantee that any of things will make my life bigger. There is no reason that moving away or getting a more important job will inherently grow my life beyond its shriveled, pollen-speck form. Even with all that space, it may well feel exactly the same size. It may still feel tightly compact, stunted, well-formed but tiny—like a sad bonsai tree.

This is because, as I'm slowly realizing, the reason my life feels small is not because I have not filled it with enough stuff—grand enough or big enough—but because most of the time when I think of my life I think of one thing: myself. My orientation has settled into the human default: inward-looking rather than outward. From this perspective, I am at the center of everything. And how much more limited of a view is it to look inward and find only myself than to turn outward and see the whole world? No wonder my reality feels diminutive.

The problem is, this stage of life—more than most, I would argue—seems designed for selfish thinking. I have no husband or children, no intricate network of nearby friends that rely on me for community or support. I live at home; I'm not passionate about my job. My primary goal is making money to pay off my student loans. There is little about my life that inherently requires me to put others' needs before my own. Of course I can always choose to do this anyway, but there are few consequences if I don't. It is easy to convince myself that no one depends on me, and therefore the only problems I need to worry about are my own.

Occasionally, for fleeting moments, I glimpse a wider, richer life. Mostly this happens when I am running with my high school girls at cross country practice or coaching them in a meet. In those moments, I am outside myself. I care deeply for their physical and spiritual well-being. I want them to run their best, but more importantly, I want them to be emotionally healthy and happy individuals. However briefly, I cease to look inward at my own paltry self and view a world unfiltered by my ego. Ironically, this is when my life feels biggest—when my self is smallest.

G.K. Chesterton said something very similar in Orthodoxy, and my thoughts on this matter are strongly influenced by his own. “How much larger your life could be if your self could become smaller in it,” he writes. It's a catchy little phrase (which of course falls in the context of a much larger discussion—Chesterton was a long-winded individual), but it is so difficult to accomplish. Just how does the post-grad in the under-stimulating work and home environment make him or herself smaller? How do I look outward (and in which particular direction?) when I have yet to discover my “calling” or “vocation”? And what if in turning away from myself I find only emptiness in my immediate environment? What if my life presents no opportunities for acts of great selflessness? Sure, I can send encouraging notes to my friends, I can load and unload the dishwasher, I can cheer for my younger siblings at their sporting events, but those little things feel pitiful when I look at the larger scope of my life, the amount of time I spend thinking about myself.

The other night I spent the evening with friends and family talking about a recent project we had attempted to accomplish in South Africa. As we collaborated on this vision, I felt my horizon grow and expand. I felt part of something larger and aware of the complexities of a world beyond my own. But I am not in South Africa right now, nor will I return any time soon. At the moment, I do not have the means for my influence to literally cross oceans, or if I do, I have yet to discover it. My power is little; therefore I turn first to the needs I know best: my own.

Life is never straightforward, nor are the commands of God easy. Somehow I have to find a way to reorient myself, even if it feels like I will still accomplish little good. I need to redefine “life” and “self” and “small.” I need to be ok with serving in mediocre ways. I need to fight against that voice that tells me now is a time where I am allowed to be selfish and greedy. But, damn—it's hard.