Pretty as a Picture

I got a digital camera ahead of the curve. I was 12 years old and paid for it all myself with cash that I saved up from my allowance and the odd babysitting job. In the tech department of Sam’s Club, I picked out the highest quality point-and-shoot available at that time: a 5 mega-pixel box of silver plastic with 3x optical zoom and a tiny screen in the back. You couldn’t sell it for $25 now. But once upon a time, it was a magnificent piece of technology.

Eleven years later, it has never been easier for the average person to take professional-looking pictures. Even the tiny cameras on cell phones take photos of surprising clarity and color---with a plethora of filter options so they can appear appropriately aged or bright or grainy or dim. Partly because of this and partly because of networks like Facebook and Instagram, it has also never been easier to share them.

I don’t necessarily have anything against this ever-expanding phenomenon, this trend of increasingly beautiful pictures shared with an increasingly large audience, but I’d be lying if I said it couldn’t use a little critical reflection. Photography can be a dangerous artform because, though it is arguably the most realistic of the visual arts, it has the ability to present as truth something which is far from it. Its very realism deceives us.

I have a friend who uploads new photo albums to Facebook on a very regular basis. He is extremely well-traveled and also possesses a professional-grade camera. This combination of facts means that nearly all his pictures look like they’re straight out of a travel-adventure magazine or possibly an advertisement for happiness. “Me in front of the Taj Mahal.” “Me and my girlfriend in Manchu Pichu.” “Me feeding a baby zebra.” “Me eating sushi in Tokyo.” They’re beautiful and exotic.

And I can’t stand looking at them.

I’m not sure if this friend is intentionally trying to make us land-locked people jealous, but if so, he is succeeding. Comments under the album usually read something like, “You’re in New Zealand right now? Are you kidding me??? SO JEALOUS!” or “stop being so cool. seriously.” Written in jest...but not really.

Which makes me sure I’m not the only one with a Facebook friend (or friends) towards whom I feel this complicated combination of fascination and revulsion, awe and envy. I want to be him and yet...oh, how I despise him.

Nearly 15 months have passed since my college graduation, enough time, it seems, for most people to get their feet back under them if they were caught off guard by the sudden rush of unregulated, unprescribed real life. Cue the comparison game. We’re all feeling a little self-conscious these days, let’s be honest. Who is working at the coolest company?, we evaluate implicitly. Who is living in the most exciting city? Who is married or engaged or dating? Whose life looks the most romantic, the most adventurous, the most successful?

It is at this point that the art of photography fails us. It is at this point that the cool 1970s filter, the photobooth crop tool, and especially the delete button, assist us in manipulating, or being manipulated by, a world that is not real.

On Facebook, or any other social networking site, you can present to others any side of yourself that you desire. You can tailor your uploads, comments, posts, and settings to reflect whatever it is you decide is the best “you.” And, of course, you’re not the only one doing this---all your friends are too. But that side of the equation is easier to forget.

We know that photographs present us with a flat image, a mere split-second in time, but we often take them at face-value anyway.

Nothing illustrates this better than the wedding albums which have been popping up on Facebook left and right this summer. I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for looking at them---even if I don’t know the girl. Artistic photography for the big day is much more important now than it ever was ten years ago, and many brides are willing to shell out big bucks for a professional photographer with an impressive portfolio. I don’t blame them---I doubt anyone regrets having high-quality pictures of such a special occasion. But the experience of clicking through a wedding album online has very little direct correlation to the experience of the actual wedding. This isn’t just the obvious difference between activity and passivity. It’s the difference between reality and idealized reality, fluid imperfection and frozen perfection. Because I think we can all agree that no picture is going to make it into the wedding album that doesn’t support a memory of flawless bliss and harmony.

Artistically focused close-ups of the flower arrangements. The bride’s sundrenched dress as it hangs expectantly in front of a window. Candid laughing grandmothers and dancing groomsmen. The “let’s have the whole bridal party jump in the air” kind of shot is no longer the limit and height of creativity. But despite the beauty of these pictures, we can’t deceive ourselves into thinking they represent something 100% real. People are rarely as happy as they look in pictures---which cannot capture things like headaches, self-consciousness, weariness, or the ill-fitting strapless bra which may really be at the forefront of your mind. No wedding is ever perfect, just like no marriage is, despite how it may appear in frozen retrospect.

I’m not advocating that we attempt to document things like frantic mothers-of the-bride, missing bow ties, uncomfortable jokes, family tension, or any of the other million things that can go wrong at weddings. But the disparity between the actual day and the albums that emerge from them serve as a good reminder that what we see in a photograph may not actually be what we get. The beauty of the bride in her pictures is no indication of how likely her marriage is to last.

Like a painter with a blank canvas, you can make your photos say almost anything you want. Remove from the frame the garbage in the street, the vendors selling cheap keychains made in China, the ragged beggars, the smell of sewer, and you can make your trip to Europe look as picturesque as a post card. Pull out your camera as your bus drives through a slum in Mexico and you might capture something truly heart-wrenching to share on your page; meanwhile your own heart remains decidedly unmoved. These things, the motives and feelings behind the photos, are something Facebook can’t show us.

We all have friends who manipulate the medium in this way, and we all, to a certain extent, are guilty of it ourselves. We post pictures of fancy lattes to advertise our high class. We strategically post, delete, tag, and untag until only the best of ourselves remain. We upload fat albums from all our adventures, pretending that its only for the purpose of “photo-sharing” with those who joined us. Or sometimes not even pretending. Because, whether we admit it or not, we want other people---even those we don’t know well---to click through our pictures, comment, “like,” and maybe even be a little jealous of all the fun we’re having. We like to feel validated in this way.

It’s definitely not something that is limited to the post-grad years, but sensitivity to such habits is perhaps increased during this time of branching out and settling down. Some find they have not landed quite where they hoped to be, and thus those pictures of their happy friend in San Francisco (who somehow manages to look so gorgeous in every picture, damn her) have a sinister, siren-like appeal. How do I measure up? we ask ourselves. What do people think when they look at my Facebook (or LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever)?

It comes down to a matter of self-consciousness vs. self-confidence. Are you secure enough to not post that picture of yourself that’s really cute? Are you satisfied enough with your own life to see past the veil of other people’s "perfect" realities?

Sometimes I find that I just have to say no to the mindless knowledge accumulation.

No, LinkedIn, I do not want to hear about Janie Jone’s new job.

No, friend from high school whom I barely know, I don’t need to see the pictures of your new loft apartment.

Nothing feeds discontentment like comparison, and nothing prompts comparison like an online diet drenched in other people's photographic lives. 

Show Me an Adult with the Courage to Fear Differently

Today, for probably the 7th time this year, I listened to a Wheaton College chapel message which I first heard in late February of 2012, just as I was beginning to feel the black shadow of college graduation creep up on me. Of the hundreds of chapel messages I sat through in my four years at Wheaton, this is the single one that remains clearly cemented in my mind, filed at the top of the academic shuffle. I’ve provided the link here, for those of you whose curiosity is piqued enough to watch it. I highly recommend it. Hopefully the speaker, art professor Leah Samuelson, would not mind my shameless endorsement were she ever to discover it (which, frankly, isn’t likely).

You might recall that I quoted part of this message in a previous blog post, back in September of last year (although, on second thought, you might not, given that it was only my second post ever). It is this same section of Leah's talk that caught my attention on the 7th (or whatever it is) listen, as it did on the first.

"How many gifts from God will justify trust and thanks?" asks Leah, speaking of her struggle to find a role model of faithful living in the year after her college graduation. "Are the pressures of life stronger than the call to be wise? Show me an adult with the courage to fear differently."

When I first heard this message, sitting in my pale blue seat in Edman Chapel, I thought I misheard her. I thought she must have said "the courage to live differently." This seemed to make more sense; it is certainly a more commonly used phrase. But after watching the video recording, I realized this is not what Leah said. She used the word "fear," and she used it intentionally.

So many of life's actions are driven not by what we love but by what we fear. We fear rejection, failure, money shortage, loneliness, shame, dependence, low status, the inability to get what we want when we want it. We worry about rent, bills, our appearance, our careers or career plans, doing things to boost our resumes or our cool factor on facebook. Getting ahead. And so our lives become oriented around meeting these needs. In some ways this is perfectly natural; such worries are not inherently bad, after all.

But what if our fears were different? What if we were driven not by these---the fears of the world---but by a different kind of concern? What if we feared selfishness, shallow relationships, greed, complacency, and apathetic living more than we feared not being able to buy a new car or get into a good grad program? What if our lives were oriented so that most of our emotional energy focused not on living well on the surface, but on living well in the deepest parts of our beings? What if we refused to buy into the concerns of our culture and instead lived with a different kind of concern?

I've been thinking a lot recently about what that would really look like. I worry a lot about my future, how I'm going to keep my bank account from running dry, what kind of career I should pursue to make my life feel valuable. These aren't bad things to think about or to want, but as Leah said, I don't want them to become the source of my life's intention. All too often, focusing on these concerns is really the easy path, the route of escape rather than transformation. A bandaide solution to happiness. Transformation is hard, and for those who really don't want it, it is avoidable.

Many twenty-somethings live---even if they claim to deny it---as if there is a magic formula for a meaningful and successful life. Steps include, among other things, a well-paying job, a grad degree, a significant other (leading to marriage), exotic travel, stylish clothes, a cool apartment, a fun group of friends, and some sort of "nonprofit" passion (because who doesn't want to save the world in their free time these days?). And so these are the things we---and I'm not leaving myself out of this---tend to pursue.

Pursuing other things, things like patience, selflessness, community, passion, and servanthood---though we claim to desire them---often fall to the bottom of our to-do lists. They don't feel very urgent. We worry about them after we think about our money or work or status problems. Practically speaking, they are not the source of our lives' intention. And, a lot of the time, they are more difficult to achieve anyway. But maybe we should be afraid; we should worry that we lack them.

I'm not totally sure how to change the orientation of my life so that my primary pursuit is not financial and social stability and security. But I think it begins with a big step back and two open hands. I think it means moving towards God, cultivating relationships, asking big questions, practicing good stewardship, and learning how to be content. It means consciously and daily challenging the assumptions of many of my peers (and myself) that career and success are everything.

When Leah graduated from college, she looked for an adult with the courage to fear differently and ultimately decided that she had to become that adult herself. I think that's what we all need to do.

Trapped in the Amber of the Moment

The physicists say that time is not a line; it is a dimension, independent of events and a fundamental structure of the universe. Or else they say that time is nothing, an immeasurable nonentity, simply referring to the mental framework that we humans have created in our heads for our own purposes.

I’m not sure which is right because the physicists do not seem to agree.

For the student on the academic calendar, time is cyclical. A slow upward spiral. The year is broken into a predictable pattern of semesters and breaks, distinct from the past and yet entirely recognizable. For some, this repetition can feel like a endless death march, a treadmill leading nowhere, ever circling: class after class broken only by the brief sunshine of a summer break. I suppose for those who dislike the formal setting of school, such a calendar might be suffocating. But now that I have been done with college for a year and off that routine for the first time since I was making finger paintings in preschool, I find myself missing the old familiar rhythms of academia. Patterns are comforting, I’ve discovered, and everything is easier to endure when you have an idea of what comes next. Isn’t this how the world survives winter?

In any case, while the academic calendar has built-in predictability, it also has built-in variety, and this is really what I miss. Each semester promises something new: a new class schedule and pattern of life, new people with whom to cross paths. For me, a new sports season. If there is a class you really can’t stand, well, you only have to gut it out for a few months. If you have a living situation that’s terrible, you can always sign up for a different one next year. Each January and especially each August offer possibilities of new adventures, experiences, knowledge, and friends. A school setting, particularly college, is one of the few places that can provide such regular novelty free from many of the stresses and fears that often accompany change.

During one of my lower moments this winter, when I was feeling particularly dramatic and pitiful, I wrote in my journal how difficult it was to look into a future that has no foreseeable marking points. No spring break. No fresh start of the school year in August. Not even a new summer job to break up the monotony. Just the same life stretching endless forward, an unbending line disappearing into the fog. Work. Bills. Sleep. To think about life this way was (and is) very depressing; I don’t recommend it. Out of my inner chaos, I began brainstorming ways to escape my life in Grand Rapids, to run away---quite literally. I saw this as the only way to rediscover the variety I missed from college life and, more to the point, to push the restart button on what I felt were the millions of mistakes I’d made since graduation.

What I didn’t see then was the way that life has of creating its own novelty, even without, yes, a new class calendar. I wanted a do-over, like the do-overs I got at the start of each school year.

A few nights ago I watched a documentary on my laptop on happiness, clicking on it impulsively after scrolling through my brother’s Netflix account. One thing that happiness researchers have found is that novelty, even in very minor things, has a big impact on emotional well-being.

Something as simple as changing up your running route or cooking a new dish for dinner can trigger releases of dopamine in the brain and boost your outlook on life. So perhaps I can’t entirely be blamed for desiring a change in my routine, wanting a bend in that straight line of time, or at least a bend that I could see. When you aren’t enjoying life and out of necessity that life doesn’t look like it’s going to change any time soon, of course you’re going to feel depressed.

But the solution to this, I realize now, is not scrapping the whole thing, biking alone across the country, and starting over from zero. That was my original self-rescue plan. Adventures like that can be good, but not when their primary purpose is to serve as an escape from a life that I half-heartedly tried to build in reluctant fits and starts. I shouldn’t have been surprised when it wasn’t really working for me.

Academic calendars have made me used to do-overs. I’m used to having the opportunity to start fresh each year, erase my mistakes (to a certain extent), and try again with a new class, professor, job, or sports season. But sometimes you have to gut through a job you don’t like for (gasp!) longer than 4 or 8 months. Sometimes, probably most of the time, when you screw up, you don’t have the luxury of starting over. You have to piece together what is left and move forward with the glue still drying.

As a perfectionist, this reality is particularly difficult for me to accept. When I mess up, in anything---a round of mini-golf, my writing, a relationship, an art project, a job---I like to be able to start over completely and forget the whole thing ever happened. Square one. A blank slate. That way I don’t have to deal with the awkwardness of living with something that is askew. It’s like when you have a crush on someone and they clearly reject you---you’d really just prefer to never see that person again.

But in this documentary that I watched, the researchers also stressed that happiness comes from challenges and difficulties, and people who struggle often become more joyful in the end. It’s a counter-intuitive reality, and one that isn’t exactly comforting in the midst of trial. Even knowing this, I’d still probably use the do-over button an awful lot if life offered one. So I guess it’s good that it doesn’t.

I’ve found that sometimes the hardest challenge of all is staring down that unbending line of life, the one that seems to promise no change worth celebrating, and reminding yourself that its straightness is an illusion. That life comes with seasons, some of which may be longer and less regular than those promised by a school schedule, but seasons nonetheless. Variety and change and unpredictable adventures. And in any case, I guess it’s ok to do the same thing for more than 8 consecutive months. It won’t kill me.

May I always live with this kind of wonder:

"First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every color has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of the garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been done."

--G.K. Chesterton, in his essay "The Ethics of Elfland", part of the book Orthodoxy

Big Fish, Bigger Pond: Reflections on the Michigan Division 1 High School State Track Meet

The forecast called for thunderstorms, but the morning is warm and clear when I arrive at East Kentwood high school for the Michigan D1 Track and Field State Meet. It seems the weather is always hot on that first weekend in June. Waves of heat rise off the track and the athletes wait nervously under the bleachers, trying to follow their coaches’ advice and stay out of the sun. In the stands, the spectators glisten with sweat. I remember one State meet that was so hot the event staff set up misting machines for the runners to stand under in an attempt to stave off heat stroke.

It’s no small thing to qualify for this meet. The runners, jumpers, and throwers around me---warming up on the infield, shaking themselves loose at the discus or long-jump pits---are the best of the best in Michigan. Exceptional athletes, all of them. This year, for the first time, I’m not here to compete myself or to watch a younger sibling compete. I’m here as a coach, with a job to do. Sort of.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been very good at attending these meets, not when I was in high school, not now. I get all riled up, agitated, restless. I want to watch the races, and at the same time, I don’t want to. Somehow, during the most important events, the ones that I used to run and should theoretically care about the most, I find myself walking in the opposite direction of the track or watching with only a peripheral interest, as if the race were little more than a commercial on TV. I detach.

Why do I do this?

While standing near the pole vault pits watching one of my athletes jump, I run into an old teammate of mine from high school. Five years ago, we competed in this meet together as members of our school record-holding 4x800 relay team. I’m very happy to see her again.

Happy, but also mildly unsettled.

Though I was a little bit faster than her in high school, this girl had walked onto a D1 track team and consequently, by the end of her career there, became a phenomenal runner. And I mean phenomenal. This girl is now leaps and bounds ahead of me. As we stand there catching up, I find myself making excuses internally, justifying why I chose to go to a D3 college, and imagining what I could have accomplished had I decided to go D1 as she had (not that any D1 schools were remotely interested in me). I want to believe that my potential is just as valuable as hers. That she is not really better than me.

Ok, so I’m jealous.

As much as I hate to admit it, it’s for this reason that the State meets always make me so restless, unwilling to watch those events I have every reason to be interested in. In high school I didn’t like feeling like a small fish in a big pond. And now I’m no longer a fish and this isn’t even my pond, but I still find myself envious of these teenagers who are faster than I ever was or will be.

Later, after the meet, I go for a run to clear my mind. It’s not so much my jealousy that’s the problem---although that certainly is a problem---it’s the assumption behind it that’s in error, I realize. It’s the idea that, at the end of the day, shaving a few seconds off my 800 time really matters, really means something about my identity and worth. It’s the desire for brief moments of glory to last longer than their due.

It is so easy to think about life in the immediate present, with it’s trivial cares and worries, and forget to take a step back and remember what it looks like from a bird’s-eye view. Setting and achieving goals in athletics or elsewhere is a great thing and has brought me much happiness over the years, but like nearly every accomplishment, it is short-lived. A flash in the pan.

Every single one of the athletes who competed at the State meet will one day lose their speed or their height or their power. Probably one day soon. It’s a victory to be held loosely lest the acid of bitterness corrode whatever lasting satisfaction it did bring. I don’t want that to happen to me, even when the day comes (which I’m sure is not far down the road) when the athletes I now coach are able to leave me in their dust.

While we were watching the girls’ 2-mile relay, my brother elbowed me and pointed down the bleachers. “Britta, look,” he said excitedly. “I’m pretty sure that’s Austin Sanders. See him? The kid with the dreads.”

I followed his finger to a muscled black man finding a seat in the stands below us. I didn’t recognize him.

“Who?” I asked.

“Austin Sanders. He won the 100 and the 200 last year. He’s super fast.”

I studied him for a moment, as he sat with his friends in the stands, watching the first heat of the relay. He was the superstar of the meet last year, but today no one---besides my brother and maybe a handful of other people---would know him from Joe. He was just a member of the crowd. Like me.

Of course, this Austin kid is probably running for some big name D1 university now with even more accomplishments under his belt, but I still felt a brief moment of solidarity with him. Today is not his day---not anymore---and it’s not mine either. It’s time I let it go.

My Top Reads for Summer 2013

Yesterday at work I wrote copy for a marketing email advertising select summer reads for a couple publishing houses. "Start your summer reading adventure today," it read. "Find the perfect book."

I found it likely that I wouldn't agree with all the books on their list, so I decided to make my own. In any case, as an English Writing major, I am frequently asked to recommend books and often find myself suddenly blanking on anything beyond a title or two. So in the future, I will just refer those people to this page. Here is my list of ten great summer (or anytime) reads:

1. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy---I will never stop recommending this novel. Set in a small town in 1969 India, The God of Small Things poignantly captures the innocence of childhood through the eyes of twins Estha and Rahel. Their narrow perspective is rivaled only by the even narrower (and not so innocent) perspective of the adults in their lives who have rendered themselves completely blind to truth. Brilliant characterization, brilliant narrative structure, and magical language. The prose reads like poetry and carries a richness unparalleled to any novel I have ever read. Where else can you read sentences like, "Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds"?

2. The Brothers K by David James Duncan---This book is not to be confused with The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (also a good book, though of a very different kind). In this case the K refers to a strike out, as in baseball, or, as one character puts it, "to come unglued, come to grief, come to blows, come to nothing." A sprawling, genre-mixing novel, The Brothers K chronicles several decades of the Chance family, especially the four brothers who come of age during the upheavals of the 60s. I love this book because while it is moving and emotionally deep, it is also laugh-out-loud funny.


3. The Princess and the Goblin by George McDonald---For those of you unfamiliar with the works of George McDonald, think C.S. Lewis plus a little more magic and mystery (McDonald was a major influence in the writings of Lewis). Like The Chronicles of Narnia, this loosely allegorical fairy tale is for adults just as much as it is for children. It's a quick read, non-intimidating, and you can get it for free on Kindle. But don't be deceived by its simplicity: The Princess and the Goblin was one of the most influential books I read in 2011.

4. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt---This memoir won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1997, and for good reason. McCourt tells the story of his childhood in America and Ireland at the height of the Great Depression, growing up poor, hungry, and largely unsupervised. The narrative is both fascinating and tragic. As McCourt himself says, "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." But I've never seen anyone capture the first-person experience of a three-year-old so accurately, nor have I been so caught up in the antics of a simultaneously world-wise and naive little boy.

5. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali---Ayaan is a controversial figure in politics, but I recommend this book more for its anthropological insights than for the political and religious conclusions to which Ayaan comes at the end of her memoir. Ayaan was born in Somalia, grew up Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia, and obtained asylum in the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage when she in her early twenties. She eventually became a member of the Dutch Parliament and now lives in the United States. Infidel tells of her Islamic and deeply patriarchal childhood, her growing disillusionment with her heritage, and her eventual turn to atheism and political activism. But I like it most for its fascinating accounts of life in East Africa.

6. Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L'Engle---At this stage in my life, Walking on Water has offered me more encouragement and direction than any other piece of literature. Most people know L'Engle as the author of the children's book A Wrinkle in Time, but this slim volume of non-fiction is my favorite of her works that I have read. My copy of the book, slyly gifted to me last summer, is thoroughly marked up and underlined, evidence of the many times it has articulated thoughts that resound deep within me. Any aspiring artist---whether writer, dancer, painter, or musician---who wants to understand the connections between art, God, and hope, who wants to "find the cosmos in the chaos," needs to read this book.

7. Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, or anything else by Maraget Atwood---Atwood is a master of characterization. Every time I read her, I am blown away by her command of language and her abundance of vivid detail. Because she is such a prolific writer, many of Atwood's novels are still on my to-read list, but the three that I have read have completely entranced me with their worlds.


8. The Stream and the Sapphire by Denise Levertov---Not many people read books of poetry anymore, including myself, but this collection of poems is one that I eagerly sought and purchased after I got a taste of Levertov in one of my college literature courses. The poems deal with themes of faith and doubt and, as Levertov remarks in the Forward, "to some extent trace my slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith." To get an idea of what her poetry is like, look up "The Avowal," one of my favorite poems in this little book.


9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy---I meant to read this novel ever since one of my college professors called it possibly the greatest work of fiction ever written, but it took me until this winter to finally get around to it. It's a hefty book, well over 700 pages in my edition, and intimidating to begin. Well worth the effort, though. Tolstoy has amazing insight into the fickle human mind. If you've seen the recently-released film version of this book, don't rule it out based on that unfortunate interpretation.


10. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson---Gilead is epistolary novel, an extended letter written by a dying father and pastor to his young son. This is by far the most difficult book on my list to describe because it is so unlike any other novel I have read. Simple, unornamented language and plot yet heart-breakingly beautiful. It is a book that will have you underlining. Deeply spiritual, full of faith and doubt and all the right questions. The narrator, Rev. John Ames, is the most ordinary and yet possibly the most profound character in all the contemporary literature I have read.

"So would I learn to attain freefall, and float"

My memory of that day is hazy. A mist obscures the details, blurs the edges. Dream-like. Shimmering. I am a little afraid to touch it for fear it will come suddenly into focus. Flood me with the four-years-worth of memories it represents, the combination of which is too bright to look at.

Has it possibly been a whole year since I walked down the steps of Edman Chapel, diploma in hand, drowning happily in a synthetic blue robe?

Sunday marked the one-year anniversary of my college graduation. The weather this time around was much like it was then. Cold and wet. Mothers’ Day. I felt an obligation and yet a disinclination to write this blog post as I moped around the house, trying to figure out why I was in such a strange mood.

At this milestone, I feel like I’m supposed to have some list of profound insights, truths I have gathered over the past year that will carry me into the next. In reality, I’m just as perplexed by life as I was when I graduated. The future remains just as opaque and my next step just as shaky and unsure.

The difference is, I suppose, that this uncertainty doesn’t bother me as much as it did then. You get used to walking around in the dark after a while, even if your eyes never fully adjust. You realize that no one really knows what they are doing, that everyone---even those much older or more experienced---are 90% faking it.

A year isn’t really that long of a time. Most lessons worth learning take decades. I think I anticipated I would only need a few months to find my feet, to uncover some path with clearly marked road signs and a straightforward direction. I didn’t expect a dream job---but I think I expected at least a dream plan.I’m not sure I want that anymore though. I sort of like the forest I’m lost in.

What can I say then to those who have donned the cap and gown this spring, who also are stepping out of the structure of a school system for the first time? Only this:

Life happens and it cannot be stopped. Unexpected and ridiculous things will happen. This is a good thing. No matter what your plans are, a year from now you will look back and be surprised by how you got there.

I do not confess to understand a thing about why or how.