New Beginnings

So, the semester and year have begun. This is a time of scrambling, stressing, preparing, too much chocolate, and probably too many late nights that we promised ourselves we wouldn't have. This is also a time for clean slates, fresh starts, new beginnings, and whatever other cliche phrases you can come up with to indicate the inception of something new. Go on, be creative. I'm not gonna do all the work for you.

Anyway, this is the quintessential time for making promises to yourself, starting on the right foot, and all that jazz. A week and a half ago, I was totally sold on the 'start the semester right and hopefully not mess it up completely by the time May rolls around' idea. Seriously. I was going to do so good.

Of course, the way I'm writing this lends to the idea that my semester start was less than stellar. You caught me, you caught me. It was. I promise I started the week exactly the way I intended though! I got up an hour early for chapel, put on some makeup, met my roommates, praised Jesus, got lunch, went to class. It was a good start to a Monday, probably the best Monday morning/afternoon I've experienced since I was still learning my multiplication tables.

Then came 3pm.

I was sitting on my couch, minding my own business, having just seen my mom and had a nice chat with her after she dropped off my roommate, when suddenly I was hit with the mother of headaches. Pounding, dizzy. The room was hot, I was claustrophobic and tired, and all of a sudden I realized--I was getting sick. All my plans, dreams, and hopes for starting the semester strong went out the window and suddenly all I could focus on was not passing out.

Still, I tried. I went to my second and final class, left half an hour early, took nyquil, and knocked out at 7pm. And thus ended what seemed like a perfect Monday.

So, yeah, high hopes for a good semester only resulted in me groaning on the couch in our living room for two days with fever-brain and a sore throat. (Seriously, though, I had a fever. Of 103 at one point. I haven't had a fever since I was in like junior high). I was really gunning for a strong start, no absences or even tardies and getting all my homework done the day it was assigned, and I ended up with practically no appearances and no work done.

I guess the moral I'm pulling from this is that plans inevitably fail. You can try to resolve for things, map out perfectly how your day, or week, or year is going to go, make yourself feel like you're in control, but you're not. I'm not, that's for sure. We've all seen some form of this in our own lives, and I think it seriously goes against everything we want as humans: we want to feel safe and secure, have things be pretty and nice and laid out in front of us. Even those that seek adventure want the freedom to seek that adventure; they don't want to be tied to home by unforeseen circumstances or happenings of fate. Thing is, though, we often don't get that, and I think we need to start being okay with things getting in our way.

Inevitability is hard to grapple with. Things that are inevitable often aren't good things, we don't say 'oh, if you do this, you're inevitably going to get ice cream at the end.' No way, we use inevitable when talking about things like death, taxes, lying, cheating, and stealing. The connotation here is way over on the negative side of the scale, but I think we should pull it more towards neutral. Plans fail, inevitably, yes, but should we take that as something negative and crappy, or as something that just happens? C'est la vie, life moves on.

So, after all that word vomit, what I'm really saying is: I need to stop getting down when stuff like this happens to me. Because I did, and it sucked, and the energy in my mod was dragged down because of it. And I'm giving a call out to everyone: stay positive, don't let this stuff get you down. Human plans fail, things get in the way, everything gets tangled up and mess. That's life, and that's the beauty of it. Everything works together, in the end--at least I hope it does. I don't think I've done enough living to really figure that part out, but I have to have faith that it will.

Until next time