Monster-mountains

(With thanks to The Avett Brothers and Welcome to Night Vale, who really have been the shield that my friends have held up for me recently.)

I-40 West has two peak driving seasons each year- late September/October and spring days like today that lull you into a false sense of summer, days when you can roll down the windows and smell the dying vivacity or purposeful renewing of the world. Driving down the road on days like today, with the windows down, the sun browning my arm, and the Avett Brothers blaring, I feel like the world is back in love with me, filling in the seams and cracks of my imperfection with warm light and fresh air. In the winter, it's so easy to forget our place in the world, to forget what our lives are all about.

Which is what, exactly?

This has been a long winter. April, I was not ready for you, but I am comfortable with blaming that on March, February, January, December, November, and September, so maybe you should have a chat with your friends, there, April. (Except you, February. Nobody cares what you think.) And in the same way that someone running away from a velociraptor doesn't particularly focus on their place and use in the world as they run, I've lost sight of whatever it is I'm supposed to be during these past few months. But I'm ready to change that. As one of my friends said, "I'm just ready to know what my purpose is."

And I think, in some ways, not knowing our purpose makes our lives harder. Not that those of us without a firm purpose are lost children wandering in the woods or anything like that, but to have a goal, to know that you're a functioning member of society, to know that your life is going to have an impact on some level, that confidence in our purpose can guide us and push us forward. If your purpose is to have a family and raise kids that then go on to have families that spread the love throughout a community, then your job takes its proper place in that vision. If your purpose is to invent and innovate and make and design and bring new ideas and thoughts into the world, then setting time aside for that creative process seems less selfish to me. If your purpose is to care for others, in body, mind, or soul, then spending time on yourself so that you can be better able to pour yourself into others makes more sense. And not that you shouldn't always have a good work-life balance, and take time to make things, and take time for yourself, and not that you can't have a combination of all of these lives and needs, but having a reason to remind you that these things are okay is helpful.

Outside of that guidance, knowing what you're supposed to be doing helps pull you out of the doldrums. I think a part of adulthood is knowing that there are going to be times of routine that can lead to stagnation. Sometimes our path takes us to stretches of sea where the winds are absent and the currents lazy. We're not wrong to be there, but we aren't meant to live there. Knowing that you have a goal and reorganizing your life around that goal is like having a steam engine on your ship. It might take more energy out of your reserves, but it will keep you going. Without that engine, you're left pacing the decks of an increasingly smaller boat, praying for a tailwind.

I love going to church council meetings, which, I think, may be the strongest sign of my call I've ever come across. But I love watching the church alive, the church thinking about its priorities, the church designing the gears that allow it to function. And I love dealing with rational functions in algebra. The problems that you get are these messy polynomials and it's your job to simplify them and reduce until they're something manageable and functional, and then you can graph the functions and use them to model real-world scenarios (kinda). But there is a joy for me in observing, quantifying, analyzing, and restructuring so that progress can be made, and putting this specific joy in a church brings verve to it. Being a member of a church reminds me that I'm a part of a bigger story and gives me instantaneous access to a community of people and a living, breathing organization that's remembering its place in the world. It wraps me in a community that, if all things were equal, would rekindle the fire in my engine to push me out of the winter's doldrums.

But, as we know, all things aren't equal. We all have our demons to face. I'm so scared of the twin monsters of Pride and Poverty, with their familiar accents, that I've sat down at the crossroads and alternated between staring them down to see who blinks first and burying my head in my arms with the hope that they'll go away when I'm not looking. I feel like one or the other monster stalks any path I want to take. Or maybe they're mountains instead of monsters, and I have to conquer them to be able to see my purpose on the other side of the road. Monster-mountains that hurl stones of indecision and listlessness at me with impeccable aim and every stone bruises. Some break.

I want to end this on a high note. I want some turnabout, some recourse, where I say, "But oh, I've had this shield [of undetermined metaphorical significance] the whole time and it's high time I started using it" or "I'm strong enough to get through this and take my place in the song/dance of life" or "I've realized that I'm reading too much into this and the best we can do is to live our lives with the love we have available to us because the idea of purpose puts on undue burden on our thoughts and existence", but none of that rings true to me.

I think things are fluid. I think I haven't seen enough of life yet to figure it out. I think that no matter how much it sucks, there are times that we have to move forward in our lives without the map that purpose can be, and know that ships can go in many directions, including backwards. I think we have to fight our demons, because they're not going to move and they're not going leave and they're not going to stop, but I don't think we have to do that alone. I think we can share our bruises. I think we can ask to be handled with care until the battle's won, no matter how many weeks or months or years we have to fight. I think we have to use the full arsenal of existence, from carefully considering our motivations to pushing forward with determination to retreating for the chance to regroup to depending on the wisdom and strength and encouragement of others to standing strong, to make our lives what they need to be so that the world benefits from the air we use.

And I think this is hard.

But I don't think that it is too hard for us.