Movies

Last night I had dinner with a good friend of mine, as I have on quite a few Tuesday nights over the course of the summer. Over dessert we had a really good conversation, mostly about college and graduation, and what senior year is and isn't good for.

As we were walking toward the escalator in Nordstrom's, the lady playing began a new song. It was a cover of Bette Middler's "The Rose" - which really made me smile because the song (okay, old and cliche as it may be) talks about a lot of the same things we'd discussed a few minutes before. We walked off the escalator and out the doors with the song still drifting in the background, and truly it was like something out of the movies.

I'm just about ready to declare my summer officially over. Tomorrow I'll start packing, and Friday or Saturday I'll be driving back to my parents'. It occurred to me that fairly soon it'll be an entire year since Brian broke up with me - for some reason, I'd forgotten how quickly time goes by. I remember everything that I wanted to accomplish immediately as a result of the breakup and it's taken me a good deal longer than I'd anticipated, but I think I've actually made a lot of progress by now. It's definitely resulted more from just living my life and focusing on taking a day at a time - and less from spending time trying to "fix" or change myself.

It makes me wonder how many of us tend to live life in this "always thinking three steps ahead" mode. In some situations, that attitude is absolutely necessary; however, I think in most cases it pays off to be really careful about not taking life too quickly and to look beneath the surface of every day. I think we all envy those people who have it together enough to be able to fully experience every new situation, because we realize how much we miss out on by not living in the moment, by not being satisfied enough with our past and worrying way too much about the future.

It's funny because a lot of people tend to equate "living in the moment" with being utterly reckless, but of course that's not what I'm advocating. There's this idea of being "fully present*" that has come up (of all places) in a lot of theology classes I've taken, and it's an idea I'm trying to really take to heart. Ironically enough, the only way to really do that is to not think so hard about doing it, and just be careful not to keep making the same mistakes that'll hold me back. I think that if I can do that this year, it'll be a great one.

So, anyway. Two more days of work, a trip home, a bunch of cleaning and repacking, some kind of retreat or trip, and then back to school. I'm more ready than I've ever been, I think.

*Comes up in a lot of discussions about the dignity of human life, and the importance of finding meaningful work in order to realize some sort of significance in the Big Plan. The idea is basically that you owe it to - whatever force created existence, even if that was random chance itself - to live fully in every moment provided to you; otherwise you're cheating yourself as well as your responsibilities as a steward of the Earth. I'll admit that I kind of like the idea of having a moral imperative to get the most out of life. It's entirely possible to take that as a very contrived bit of rhetoric, especially if you aren't willing to take the idea of a God or any absolute sense of human responsibility as axioms, but to me it's comforting, so I go with it. I think I could also make a convincing argument about human happiness and successful lives growing out of that kind of imperative, but that wasn't my point here...