All of this has been wonderful, unexpected, and also like a long, slow vice-grip to the heart. Glass is half full: I never in a million years dreamed that at 23 I would have such a long list of meaningful relationships and incredible experiences to make me grateful to the world. Much less did I imagine that I would get so many opportunities to make new memories with old friends. I never thought I would have so many amazing people in my life. Glass is half empty: I also never thought that I would reach a point where I live most of my life without seeing any of those people at all. That most of my "life events" would happen with hardly any of my closest friends or my family there to witness them. And that I would see some of the most important people in my life for only a couple of days or a couple of hours a year.
Most of the time I'm a glass-is-half-full person, as most of you probably know. I like to focus on hope (and please don't turn that into a double entendre...that unintentional pun is my least favorite thing about Hope College), because I don't think much comes out of focusing on despair. But at the transition times in my life, I often experience these moments of loss, of really appreciating how many people and places we will have to mourn in the course of our lives. There are really very few emotions I fear as much as I fear loneliness.
And yet - to swing back into the realm of optimism, perhaps accompanied by eye rolling - I haven't yet found a way to appreciate what something/someone/someplace means to me without losing it. As hard as I try not to take my present for granted, it's my past that really teaches me what and whom and how to value. Who really knew what a terrific show Arrested Development was until it got canceled and all other television failed to live up to its standard? And who knew that Dostoevsky was the greatest author to ever live before he died and couldn't write the sequel to The Brothers Karamazov? (That's a little joke for all of you who hate me for ever recommending it to you.)
I usually don't wax quite so philosophical in these posts, but that's the taste I have on my tongue as I near the end of an incredible summer. I am so grateful for my friends and family. I think maybe some people never get to care about in a lifetime as many people as I've cared about in 23 short years. It's wonderful and awful. And as much as I love them, and as far away from me as they are, I've still got to find the energy to be here, now, wherever I am, ready to throw everything I have into whatever/whoever new comes my way. In a few weeks I will move to Boulder and for four months, that will be home - that place and those people will get inside me and change me and make me a new person and after that, Boulder will be mine forever, but I'll also have yet another place to be homesick for. It's a high price to pay, but also a fair one. More than fair, when I consider how good the good times are.
The accelerating rate of decomposition in my grammatical standards signals that the time has come to draw my reflections to a close. I'll leave you with some photo highlights from my summer so far. Thanks for reading and thanks for being one of those people I'm talking about in this post.
Summer
Weddings
Road Trip
Friends
