Last night, I went through my 2014 calendar to prepare my 2015 calendar for use. I opened up each week in 2014's calendar and tried to breathe in the essence of it. Some weeks were stressful and I wanted to quit life. Some weeks were warm and cozy. As I went through, I took note of every birthday, anniversary, and death date, and had to decide whether they were worth remembering for the year that will soon be here. And as I went through my calendar, I was surprised by the quickness of life, which sounds very generic, but still continues to be true. All of the babies I know grew so much in this small year. There were so many little moments involved in the making of this year, and now they're all over. Now is the time to reflect on how they changed me. Did they change me?
Last January doesn't feel like yesterday, because it wasn't. I'm not sure what it does feel like though - it feels like such a long time ago, but also at least somewhat recent.
I use my calendar a lot. It makes me feel like I have control to look at my schedule and figure out how everything will work logistically. While I am doing so, I often have irrelevant thoughts that I know I'll want to remember in five seconds when they're gone from my working memory. When that happens, I write down whatever it is I'm thinking about in the margins of my calendar so I don't forget. Some of them are things like "white leather cleaner" or "plan music teams," or sometimes they're more thoughtful and conceptual, like just the word "fledgling" and how that embodies my life right now in some ways. In going through my calendar last night, I found so many of these scribbled notes and thoughts - some that made sense and some that didn't at all. Mostly, though, they were notes that wouldn't make sense to anyone else but made complete sense to me. It's nice to be able to look at a phrase that I wrote down hurriedly six months ago and still be able to figure out what I meant by it.
One of the things I am looking forward to the most in 2015 is looking back at the year when it's over and breathing in the essences of how days and weeks felt as they pranced through time and seeing the haphazardly-jotted snippets of thoughts that I felt in the moment to be important enough to remember for later. I wonder what things in 2015 will be worth remembering, both the thoughts that I write in the margins of my calendar and the events - will I make new friends? What will my roommate and I dress up as for Halloween? What kind of feelings will I feel? What kind of adventures will I have? Where will I travel? How will I grow?
In analyzing all of these inquiries I have about this coming year, I am reminded that life is to be celebrated, and not so much planned for. I write down the important days to remember in 2015 so that I can plan for them, but so I can plan how I will celebrate them, because days are gifts. They are meant to be happy, which doesn't mean that I will never be stressed, because I often am and I will continue to be. But, even through stress, I can be grateful to God for letting me have this day and each day and take a breather to decide how I can best glorify Him with it, and I can remember that He's in charge and be thankful for that, too.
At Camp, we sing a song called "Sing Your Way Home." The words are below -
Sing your way home
At the close of the day
Sing your way home
Drive the shadows away
Smile every mile, for wherever you roam
It will brighten your road
It will lighten your load
If you sing your way home
Kind of like how Snow White whistles while she works, I plan to sing my way home - to be lighthearted enough that I can take life seriously but not too seriously while it goes by - sometimes life and I will go at the same rate, sometimes it will go faster than I, and sometimes I will go faster than life. At all of the speeds, I want to be found rejoicing and singing.
Love,
Lauralicious
