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Every once in a while I will drive around town and drive by our old houses. There are 2 other than the one I am currently in. One is the house of my youth, the first house I ever lived in. 412 Linda Lane. When I drive by I always think about the tree that was in the front yard for so many years and the tree that they replaced it with. I think about the area in between that house and the house next to it, the area that I would run away to when my mom and I would fight. I think about the time I came home from school and the wind blew the door shut on my finger and how soon after, I would have to walk down the street to the soccer fields to take team pictures, Batman band-aides on my held up injured hand as tears stream from my face. Great photo. I think about the time I threw a baseball bat at my brother and the time I thought it killed him. I drive down the street where I said my first curse word when I called my brother an asshole for not going back home with me to get my forgotten backpack. I think about the dogs that we had there and when we got new carpet.
Those things will always be mine, no matter who is living in that house and no matter what house I am living in.
I feel kind of homeless right now. Even though I am staying at a house I have lived in off and on for almost 15 years and I sleep in the same room I always have, something is missing.
I have been having these great but short conversations at work with a friend named Hannah about the direction of my life. She is a psychology major or something and I think she will probably write a book someday about the quarter life crisis I am going through. The other day we were talking about me moving somewhere and I confessed to her that I don’t think it will matter where I am in my life because the same things that bother me about living here will bother me somewhere else. I told her that I was looking for a journey in my life, and that things here had been figured out for the most part because there was no more danger. The things that matter to the world, job, good looks, bank account, etc, I realized had no hold on who I actually was and I wanted nothing to do with them. The way the world throws judgment at people is not how I judge myself; I am much stricter because my judgments come from inside the dark cracks of my own life.
Those things will always be mine. No matter where I run off to and no matter the place my heart calls home.
My heart feels homeless right now. Even though it has lived off and on in the same place since it’s first beat I can’t sleep at night knowing that something is missing.
I have always felt I had a “free spirit”. It seems like I do a lot of chasing in my life, chasing of things, status, girls etc. and whenever I finally attain those things they never seem worth it. In fact, I would say that sometimes the things we want most in life are the things we probably need to stay away from. If something is attainable then we probably shouldn’t go for it, but if something seems impossible then we should be drawn toward it. I think that’s where I am in my life, looking from a distance at a mountain that looks impossible. I don’t think I want to climb it, I think I would rather move it.
I had an idea for a short story the other day about a small group of people that lived in a valley that called themselves Mountain Movers. They all were dirty and had beards and they made mustard and that’s about as far as I got. I planned that they would hold the secret to moving mountains, the secret to what the Bible calls having faith. The secret was that there was no secret. The magic was not in their beards and dirty faces, but it was in their faith. The moral of the story was that as spiritual believers we have already giving up on trying to move the mountains in our lives because we think we can’t. I don’t know if the Bible is literal about that verse about mustard seeds and moving mountains but I know our culture has turned it into metaphor. We also stopped believing in miracles. We also don’t have faith enough to take on the day. And somehow, I think these things are all connected.
If we don’t fear it, we don’t want it. Whenever something is easy and routine and doesn’t scare the urine out of your bladder or force the insides of your stomach to come out of your mouth, the reality is you might be going down the wrong path. I think that’s why I’m okay with my life right now. I come home and try to write everyday and most days now I just stare at the screen and think about giving up.
Giving up before I ever really start.
I had a rough day last week and so I decided to take a bath and after the bath I wrote this:
I just spent the last 30 minutes of my life listening to my heartbeat.
There I was, lying in a bathtub half filled with soapy warm water. The back of my head rested on the bottom of the tub and the water rose up just over both of my ears. I closed my eyes and listened to my heart.
All I could think about was how my heart beats ever second or so, regardless if I am underwater to hear it and how it will keep playing its subtle but important song until the day I die. After settling down, I began to feel my heart beat in my chest and it was playing my rib cage like a xylophone. Once my breathing calmed down, I could actually hear my heart beat through the water and bounce off the tub’s walls and back into my eardrum. My world, for the last 30 minutes, was dark and quiet, as I had somehow managed to turn off my ears and listen to my inside.
A mental picture of myself jumping in the air towards something popped in my mind with every beat. Every time I jumped and my feet hit the ground, a commanding thud matched the thump of my heart. Jump after jump, a desperate attempt to grab onto something failed each and every time. But there was this rhythm to it that made the failures seem almost beautiful.
Jump after jump.
Missed attempt after missed attempt.
Thud after thud.
It was my life summed up in a continual .8-second loop streaming into my meditative state. A constant reaching for something - anything - and a constant failure at actually grabbing on to it. Over and over again, my life has seemed to be filled with these moments. Ecclesiastes calls it a chasing after the wind. It seems as though my life is on a journey of this constant loop of reaching and jumping as long as my heart will continue to beat. Every time my feet landed and made the noise, my immediate reaction however was to jump up and go again. I’m not mad about this loop, it actually taught me something about myself.
…
I think my jumping at something, my quarter life crisis, and my desire for journey all can be summed up in my longing to have my heart find a home. I realize now that having a home does not mean that the journey is over, but it just means you have a place and a reason to come back. I want to go on a journey of moving mountains with words and I want to keep jumping towards something even if the something isn’t seen in the picture. I encourage you to do the same. Maybe the reason you hate your job or get stressed isn’t because you hate your job and are stressed, but maybe it’s because your life seems figured out. I will tell you that since I have decided to write everyday and to write a book I have dealt with more internal problems than ever before, I have become an emotional and physical wreck, and maybe even a little insane. But I will say that I have never been more alive. Life is slowing down because everyday is no longer the same. Some nights I can’t sleep at night and some days I have nothing to write, but I still try to go to sleep at night and try to write something. It’s the journey, not the destination. It’s the longing, not the attaining. The grasping, not the grabbing. It’s the home, not the house. This, my friends, is a backwards journey we are on to the Kingdom.

