The Box

When I got home today from a fun morning/early afternoon of Benson Family/St. Mark's/Choir Camp Prep, I realized that I had nothing particular to do with the rest of the day (someday I'll stop being surprised by this).  So I made a few phone calls on the "not-so-much-fun-but-necessary" list and then looked around, asking the invisible, yet ever-present task master in me, "what next?"  

The answer turned out to be...

The Box.  

When I left my church job in June, I piled all of the various notebooks I had been using to store chord charts for the last five years into The Box, determined to consolidate and organize the whole mess into one resource that I could actually use successfully at some point in the future.  Well, I've been kicking The Box and scraping my knees on its edges all summer, and today I realized that one of the cool things happening in my life right now is the ability to do (a few of) the things I always wish I had time to do.  I didn't do an A-plus job, and The Box is still in my room, but the five notebooks have become three, and everything is in place for the next round of organizing and purging.  My old standards (and perhaps lifestyle) would have demanded that I finish the whole thing in one go because this was the only chance I had to complete the task at hand.  But now, sooner than I can imagine, there will be another afternoon where I will have nothing more pressing than alphabetizing and organizing, and so The Box remains.

There are several other boxes in my room right now, and my work with The Box today led me to empty another box, this one full of leftover notebooks from the worship team members I played with during much of college.  It was a bit eerie to wade through multiple years of my life in terms of a weekly worship service I helped plan and lead.  One notebook still had every set-list from my senior year.  In The Box, I saw parts of my history fly by- the teams I had been a part of, the teams I had led, the music that characterized each of those experiences.  And now in this box, I remembered more clearly the individual roles of the people I was privileged enough to play and sing with for those years.  And while sorting through all this music was not necessarily been thrilling, it did help me feel a sense of gratitude.  For the songs and stories we have shared over the years, for the gifts and talents we have developed and served with, for the people who have been a shaping force in my life and who continue to influence me now.  Many of them come to mind when I hear a song that they led in a particularly unique way.  A ringing open E chord will always bring my guitar-playing friends to mind.  An egg shaker makes me shake my head and laugh a bit.  The sound of a djembe.... well, I could go on for a while.  But the point is that, even in this confusing season, I can find things that ground me, reminding me of who I have been, and maybe, just maybe, who I can be again.

Is this what Saturday feels like?

Today is Saturday.  In recent history, the word "Saturday" hasn't mean anything special, like I vaguely recall it did when I was a kid.  Saturday meant Dad was home all day, there was a possibility of some sort of special breakfast, probably a random sporting activity, and maybe a trip to Home Depot if we were all lucky.   By the time I got to college, Saturday was the one squander-able day of the week.  Homework could be put off until Sunday and there was a very real possibility that I could sleep in as long as I wanted (provided there were no choir tours, retreats, or special meetings).  For the last two years, Saturday has pretty much just been another work day, and often was simply The Day Just Before Sunday (insert stressful music cue here).  But now, I think, things are a little different.  Here's what today looked like:

4 AM     Wake Up
11 AM   Done with Work
1 PM      Shopping and Lunch Date with Mark and Lisa
4 PM      Nap Time
6:30 PM Wake Up (again, this time for dinner)
7:30 PM Water Balloon Toss with Madelynne
8 PM      ......um......

This is when it hit me that I was reentering the normal world.  What do you do with a Saturday night?
I don't have anywhere to be tonight.  
I don't have to be anywhere before 9 AM tomorrow, so I don't have to go to bed yet.  
I don't have anything looming over my figurative head, giving me literal shoulder tension.  
I guess I could do something for fun.  

Then the room began to spin with possibilities..... watch a movie.... read a book... aimlessly wander Facebook for hours (ambitious, I know) ... call up old friends... reorganize my collection of magazines.... knit something.  I don't even know where my knitting needles are, but the point is that if I wanted to knit something, I could.  What freedom, what exhilaration!  Before I let the bigness of it all sweep me away forever, I found a letter of recommendation I needed to write for a student and settled down to the task at hand.  But I'm rebelling against the old definition of Saturday in small ways.... buying the Mumford and Sons album on iTunes, texting with a friend I want to catch up with, thinking about eating some leftover chocolate from Germany.  This, my friends, could be the life.

Listen Up

I was talking with someone yesterday about my current life direction (or lack thereof) and the piece of advice that kept surfacing in our conversation was this:

listen

Funny, I keep thinking that I need to think, and make lists (maybe even t-charts!) and this dear person kept bringing me back to just one word.

listen

At least the scenery is pretty

I'm writing this post from the deck of the McIvor family cabin on Priest Lake in northern Idaho.  Sometime today, I'll head back to the relatively waterless abyss that is Spokane these days, but for now I'm enjoying the quiet morning with a cool breeze and sparkling water- yes, it actually does look like Ariel's dress when her dad turns her into a human at the end of The Little Mermaid.  I've been up here for a couple days, with an aunt, uncle, and various other family members, and as much as I love it here, the quiet has honestly been terrible!  I know that I have a hard time being silent (the day we spent in silence and solitude at Tall Timber over JanTerm three years ago practically killed me), but I have an especially hard time being silent when my heart is restless.  So, naturally, being the good little escapist that I am, I have done pretty much nothing but read since I got here.  I finished one book, and have read three more in the course of the last two days.  And we're not talking Boxcar Children here- I have been a reading maniac.  Only now the problem is, in addition to all my own mixed up thoughts, my mind and heart also now contain all the mixed up thoughts of the characters in the books I've been reading.  I have a hard time with emotional boundaries, and now I've let all these fictional people (and in one case, real people) waltz on into my heart and sit down for a cup of tea while they tell me about all the problems in their version of the universe.

This is ridiculous.

I have got to figure out who the heck I am.  What do I really care about?  What really matters?  What do I really want?

Since I have no hope of solving the world's (or my) problems today, I'm going to start small.  What do I really want?  A cup of hot chocolate.  This I can do.
Baby steps, my dear one, baby steps.