On Being Content

It’s fascinating which conversations stick with you and drift around in your thoughts for a while.

A few weeks ago, when I was talking to a friend on the phone, she asked me, “Are you content?” Her question was timely. The week before that, I had begun to realize that nothing in my life was broken. Rather, everything was quite alright; so, I had no reason to be discontent. Instead, I decided, I have every reason to be grateful for the people and circumstances that are currently part of my life.

Both my friend and I were beginning to understand that we can have sunny sky days and disastrous Jonah days, feel elated and downtrodden, and still be content with our lives. As human beings, we have the ability to exist at a place within ourselves that is deeper and more foundational than our emotions. Although our emotions are legitimate reactions to our circumstances, they are immediate and fleeting. We always need to take them with a grain of salt, so to speak. This has been an important lesson for me.

So, that’s why my friend asked, “Are you content?” She saw that my answer would tell her more about my life than my current emotional reaction.

The answer is: yes, I am content. My lifestyle is simple, but I have a great deal of freedom, since I only have myself to take care of right now. My job challenges me to learn about and try many styles of writing—from administrative memos, to marketing emails, to event ads. The people I work with are striving to know God and do His will. I have two fantastic housemates who make me laugh, put up with my occasional grouchiness and my tidying spurts, and love great music. (The Oh Hellos, anyone?) My friends live all over the country, but they are just a phone call (or plane ride) away. I have met some new people over the past month or two, and I am hopeful that new friendships will develop in time. I’ve gotten comfortable with being at home in the evening and doing nothing but knitting while watching TV.

Most importantly, I am content—or rather, at peace—with my relationship with the Lord. When I can’t sense His presence, it can be tempting to think that I’ve gotten something wrong, or that I need to fix our relationship by trying some other devotion or prayer. But I don’t think that’s what He actually wants. In those times, I think He asks me to trust that He is still leading me.

Prayer is a gift from Him. So, whether I am distracted or bleary-eyed, I am thankful that He gives me the grace to make my effort to be with Him each day. And I am content to wait until He reveals Himself to me.

“For God alone my soul waits in silence; from Him comes my salvation.” –Psalm 62:1

All Is Gift

I don't remember this morning's Mass readings. But I remember that Father's homily was about gift.

He defined a gift as "something you don't deserve that is freely bestowed on you." The giver does not expect to receive anything in return, but gives from the abundant generosity in his heart.

Father went on to ask us: "What gift has God given you? How does He want you to use it?"

Often, I forget that I even have a gift. I forget that God has given me the capability to understand and express ideas through words. The gift of writing. 

I just write. I don't think about it. 

Last week, we received two responses to the monthly newsletter that I write for the company I work for. Both were positive comments on the quality of the email. This morning, another person responded to a different email campaign I wrote, saying they were grateful for our prayers and support. 

I wrote those emails. 

God gave me the gift to touch others through words and that happened. They were moved. They saw a glimpse of His goodness.

How thankful I am for this gift! 

What gift has God given you to change the world with? Ask Him to help you use it!

How that One Random Shoe Ended Up in the Road

For the last few months I've been going to Art Club, an informal gathering of artists that my friend MAK started. Now, Art Club isn't exactly what it sounds like. We look at art and talk about it; or we have a discussion question like, "What does it mean to be an artist?" We had never made art—until this past Wednesday.

Since no one had volunteered to facilitate our discussion for this week, MAK decided that it would be fun to do a little free writing with jazz music playing in the background. I've always been terrible at free writing. Maybe because my perfectionist side has trouble relaxing and letting the thoughts flow. My inner editor gets overly focused on the details of sentence structure, diction, and punctuation, which makes free writing more like torture than riding a roller coaster.

But on Wednesday night at Art Club, I let my thoughts carry me away. The result? I wrote fiction for the first time in about two years! It was exhilarating. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to make up stories.

Just for fun, here is one of the fictional scenes I wrote this week. The only edits I made were to add paragraphs. Enjoy! 

"How that One Random Shoe Ended Up in the Road" 

Even when you think your day cannot get any more awful, it will. Trust me. I've been there.

My boyfriend dumped me that morning. I spilled red Kool-aid all over my new white shorts. And then, as I was crossing the street to get in my car, I stepped in a pothole, with a car coming down the road toward me, and I couldn't get my foot back out. It wasn't a particularly large pothole, but it was large enough that my foot (and I have big feet) could go in it. Why my foot wouldn't come out, I have no freaking idea, but that car wasn't slowing down and I was like, "Holy crap, I'm going to die."

So I bent over, untied my shoe, and booked it across the street without it. And what do you know, that damn car hit the pothole and my shoe sailed through the air at least 25 yards and landed in somebody's driveway. He was just backing out and squashed my tennis shoe flat as a pancake. 

I swear this all happened in the space of 75 seconds.

Virtue of Victory

I used to consider myself a patient person, but no more.

Over the past six months, I’ve been through multiple transitions­­—leaving a volunteer program, moving three times, starting a new job—and each of these circumstances tested my patience in a different way. When leaving the volunteer program, I was impatient because I could not talk about the transition and didn’t know when it would happen. Lack of response to dozens of job applications left me wondering if I would just have to work at Taco Bell. My new job suits me, but during the beginning weeks I found myself often frustrated that I didn’t know how to access necessary information, where to get mailing labels, and who could answer questions about which project. 

Perhaps these circumstances are not worth losing patience over, but I frequently did. (And I still am. I was impatient over a project I was working on yesterday, because someone had decided to edit it before I was finished.) The waiting, the frustrations, made me uncomfortable and I wanted to speed the process up. I wanted an immediate answer. 

These transitions and my feeling impatient have led me to think about what it truly means to be patient. Merriam Webster Dictionary defines patient as: “able to remain calm and not become annoyed when waiting for a long time or when dealing with problems or difficult people.” Patient people never lose their inner peace. They realize that everything will work out in the end.

Patience seems linked to perseverance. Delays, difficulties, and disasters will happen, but patient people keep going in spite of all that. They wait for the plant to grow, the rain to come, the consolation to whisper peace. If the answer doesn’t come when they expect it or if a difficulty appears in their path, they persevere in calm. Eventually, the waiting ends and the patient have gained all that they waited for.  

Patience is victory.

Postscript to Tidying Up

After reading Marie Kondo’s first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, I decided to experiment with some of her suggestions to test their effectiveness. Since I do not have a house or apartment of my own, and because I thoroughly cleaned out my closet and keepsakes quite recently, I did not apply her broad two-step process of discarding and then putting each item in its place in order to tidy my space. Instead, I chose to apply a rather insignificant portion of the book—how to fold clothes.

Kondo comments in her book that she teaches most of her clients how to fold their clothes during their consultation sessions. Based on the examples she gives, many people fail to take time to fold their clothes and may not know how to fold at all. I found this a bit shocking, since I folded my clothes even in college, where it probably would have been easier to leave them in the laundry basket. I wondered what could possibly be different about Kondo’s method of folding.

The basic suggestion Kondo gives is that you should aim to fold your clothes into a perfect rectangle. She says that items should be stored vertically—which makes sense for books and pencils, but not necessarily for shirts or socks. If items are stacked, the items on the bottom are subjected to more pressure, wrinkling them. In addition, you cannot see what exactly you have in the drawer if your clothes are stacked.

As skeptical as I was at first, that idea is what finally persuaded me. I enjoyed the thought of being able to see every single piece of clothing in my drawer when I opened it up, and so I decided to try Kondo’s advice. Last weekend, I re-folded each item of clothing in five of my six drawers so that it was in a rectangle of drawer height, able to stand vertically next to the other clothes.

Here are the results:

 Now I can see all of my t-shirts at once!

 

My socks fit in the drawer much better this way!

I have not paid attention to whether this method of storage actually reduces wrinkling. It does take a little more time to fold clothes like this, but it is satisfying to reach in and grab exactly what I want instead of shuffling through stacks of clothes.

As of now, I have not experimented with any of Kondo’s other concepts. Some I find too strange—such as the idea of thanking each possession before discarding it—and others are not presently relevant to my life. I do wish I had read her book before sorting through my pile of keepsakes, since I may have approached the project differently.

On the topic of keepsakes Kondo says, “It is not our memories but the person we have become because of those past experiences that we should treasure. This is the lesson these keepsakes teach us when we sort them. The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not for the person we were in the past.” It is this attitude of embracing who we are that frees us from holding on to unnecessary clutter.

Reading Room: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Do you find yourself itching to finally declutter your house, but are not sure where to start? Then Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up might be the book for you. In a conversational manner, Kondo provides her readers with a map for putting their homes in order, an art she has been teaching to clients for years.

Kondo begins her book with a discussion about why people fail to keep their houses orderly before moving on to instruct readers about the process of tidying. Her method is extraordinarily simple, involving only two practical steps: discarding and putting each item in its place. As Kondo herself says, anyone can grasp it.

Throughout the book, Kondo’s exceptional understanding of human nature is evident. She points out, mostly through examples, why people tend to keep items they do not really need—whether it be clothes, papers, or nostalgic knick-knacks. I found myself nodding along in agreement with her wisdom.

Although some readers may find Kondo’s style repetitive, this is partly due to her subject matter and partly to her rhetoric. The more she repeats a statement, the more the reader begins to wonder if it is true. This might lead some readers to try out Kondo’s advice for themselves.*

Ultimately, Kondo reminds those seeking domestic organization that the purpose of putting one’s space in order is freedom to deal with the deeper things in life. When we are no longer so focused maintaining external order, then we have the time and energy to turn inward. 

*Yes, I did try some of Kondo's advice. Pictures coming soon!

Spring Has Sprung!

Happy Spring and Happy Easter! On Saturday morning, I snapped this lovely photo with my phone and wanted to share it here, but when I sat down to write up a post to go with the picture it had started snowing! The snow came down in big clods and by Sunday morning the ground was covered a lacy white blanket. Imagine that. 

The sunshine has returned today and my daffodils, which drooped with the cold, have perked up again. However, the forecast for this weekend predicts a return of the snow; nature always surprises us. I guess that is part of the beauty of living in a climate with seasons. 

During this fickle spring season, I hope you are able to enjoy glimpses of beauty like these daffodils, birds returning to your yard and baby tree leaves. We are offered an incredible opportunity to reflect on the Resurrection of Christ while we watch the world burst into bloom around us.

Reading Room: The Opposite of Loneliness

After the tragic death of a 2012 Yale graduate, her parents and teachers decided to publish a collection of her fiction and non-fiction. The young author was Marina Keegan. The book is The Opposite of Loneliness, a spunky, yet polished, journey into the struggles of the young generation.

Throughout the collection, Keegan’s voice as a writer is effectively conveyed, which calls for a nod of appreciation to those who chose which pieces to include. Although Anne Fadiman, one of Keegan’s teachers, states in the introduction that Marina would have wanted to revise the pieces more before publication, they are nevertheless polished. None of the stories seems unfinished, and the essays are precise in their scope.

Always humorous, Keegan keeps her audience engaged through her shocking statements. For example, Keegan begins an essay about celiac disease with a list of items that she will instruct the nurse to bring her on her deathbed—goldfish, Oreos, cold beer—and the reader begins to wonder why these items are related. After a bit of suspense, Keegan reveals that these food items all contain gluten, which is harmful to those with celiac disease. (Keegan herself has the disease she is writing about.) It is a nostalgic way to begin an essay about a serious topic.

In both her fiction and essays Keegan does not refrain from writing about the struggles of her age, which led one critic to label her “a new voice of her generation.” Does writing about drug addiction and the pain of undefined relationships really make Keegan a superb writer though? Sure, Keegan expresses the moral longing of a generation, but she never comes to any answers. For some readers, this may be problematic. Is it okay to ask the questions, but not to answer them?

However, Keegan’s overall attitude towards the world remains one of hope. She senses the potency of her youth and seeks to convey this to her Yale classmates in the titular essay, “What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over.” Some of Keegan’s other essays, such as “Song for the Special,” point toward this hope and remind readers that they can change. And this is where Marina Keegan’s true brilliance as a writer lies—in sparking a light in her readers’ hearts.

It's Okay to Lose the Baggage

Sheets of kindergarten-ruled writing paper with misshapen letters; a shakily traced hand-turkey; certificates of achievement from dance, gymnastics, and cross country; birthday cards, first communion cards, graduation cards; a newspaper clipping showing a piano performance—these are a few of the souvenirs of my twenty-three years on this planet.

We all have keepsakes like this—that one drawer in our desks that we shove papers into and never clean out until it is overflowing, a box in the back of our closet, the knickknacks cluttering our dresser—and still we save more clippings, cards, and curios. It is overwhelming. I am here to ask: Why do we do this?

There are many reasons. A particular drawing holds value because we liked who we were when we made it. Or an object of no significance to someone else—like a pop tab with glued-on googly eyes—reminds us of an inside joke shared with a high school best friend. Programs, ticket stubs, and amusement park maps stack up on our bookshelves because we enjoyed those experiences. Wistfully, we pack these tokens away, perhaps hoping that we will preserve the past by doing so. What really happens is that we forget about the items, pack them away in some dark closet, and flip through the filing cabinets of our minds when we want to relive a memory.

It is true that from time to time we do need physical reminders of various aspects of our lives. This is why we hang photographs of our family members and friends around our homes or write a grocery list before going to the store. However, it becomes impossible and impractical to keep a material item from every single event in our past, even of all the important events. Keeping all of those papers and trinkets would overwhelm us with clutter.

Saying goodbye to these remnants of our past is healthy, since as we grow in maturity, we put those immature ways behind us. Freeing ourselves from the clutter of the past liberates us to live more fully in the present. We will remember the events of our lives, as they remain in our minds and hearts, but we are less tempted to dwell there. There is also an entirely practical element to decluttering: We have fewer boxes to move if we relocate and valuable storage space becomes available.

Finally, when it comes down to the crux, the whole of our experience is contained within our persons and material items cannot fully express that experience to another. I have seen this in the knickknacks and papers my parents have had to sort through after my grandparents’ deaths. Some are interesting to look at for their historical significance, but others—old grade reports, high school diplomas, snapshots of old friends—lose their meaning in the absence of the person who treasured them. My grandmother’s papers express barely a sliver of who she was.

Should we throw away everything that reminds us of the past then? Not necessarily. But we should think about what to keep and choose only what is most important.* Don’t be afraid to throw away (or recycle) the rest. It's okay to lose the baggage.

 

*Some questions to ask yourself:

Will I look at that (card, paper, program, map) again? 

Does this item remind me of the best version of myself?   

Would my grandchild want to keep this? 

Rain At The End Of February

As I write this, the rain is a steady drizzle outside. It hasn’t rained this much since November. I keep returning to the image of a garden when I think of my heart, mind, and soul—that good fruits must be carefully cultivated in those fertile places—and the rain reminds me of that this morning. Rain is a necessity for the garden. Water hydrates the seedlings and helps them to grow stronger.

We too have times of rain in our lives, where nothing seems to be going as planned and all of our preconceived notions about where we will be, what we will do, and who we are wash away. I am in one of those rainy seasons now. Only six weeks ago, I expected to be living in Cleveland until August, making new friends in the area, and looking for a new job come June, or maybe even July. Instead, I am at home and looking for a job now. In February. And it is raining. My expectations for the next six months have washed away.

If the rain did not fall, though, what reasons would we have to grow and change? When would we be challenged to sink our roots deeper in the soil? How else would we be forced to consider that we are not in control? The rain may startle us, but it reminds us to consider these questions and not to settle for a shallowly rooted existence.

For me, and I hope for you, the rainy season is not futile. It is an opportunity to grow my roots deep as I wait for the sunshine to return. While I am waiting, I am searching again for who I am and what I will do, how I will blossom. I am storing up the strength to unfold my petals. And the sun will come soon. It always does.

But now? Now is the time to rejoice in hope, the hope that we shall finally see the sun.