The Bus.
Everything I need to know about living a full life, I have learned from guys on the bus. Its a funny thing to realize, but it is true for me. Haphazard conversations have provided me with abounding amounts of humor, wisdom and insight.
Here are some of the things I have learned: Stay in school, work hard, don’t be afraid to dream, take lots of picutres, laugh at cartoons, don’t be ashamed to cry for your loved ones when they die, do what you love, be respectful, life isn’t always fair but it is good, don’t have kids too soon, be careful who you sleep with, and make sure you always have your bus pass with you.
These conversations are rich, even when they are short and even when they are uncomfortable. They are valuable every time. No matter how much I learn about others and where they are from I feel like I always walk away with a thousand tidbits of wisdom for myself. I swear: guys on the bus can see into my soul. There have been a few that have guessed things about me that are eerily correct, and others that have been way off. I’m grateful for every one of them, though.
I could write a whole book just about guys I have met on the bus. It makes me wonder why the women always stay silent. Maybe it is something about me, or maybe it is that they generally don’t have the cocky confidence that says what they say is valuable no matter what it is.
It feels like I am a magnet for old guys that just like to hear themselves talk. Its okay with me, because I love to hear them talk. Each one is a snapshot burned into my brain, and I never want to forget a single one. I don’t want to forget their faces, their tears, their stories or their smiles. I don’t want to forget what they’ve given me: confidence, resolve, affirmation, insight, wisdom, and a reminder that people are beautiful, and they never stop being beautiful, even when they are a mess.
Youth
I don’t know if this bit of my life – this ambiguous ‘youth’ stage – will feel like a blink or more than a blink by the time life is all said and done. In moments I don’t feel young. Many moments I don’t understand what it means to be young at all. I feel weathered by life already. I have seen many places and met many people. I have learned that there is always something that comes next as long as I am breathing, which is something I had no grid for even a few years ago. Some days I feel like I have life by the horns, and some days it feels like it has me by the horns. I even have gray hairs on my head! That must be a sign that this 22 years has been robust in ways that have grown me older than my baby face allows onlookers to understand.
I think youth is the time before the concrete of “real life” has hardened in the mold of life’s foundation.
Regardless of how I feel, I know I am young still. I know it because there are so many unexplored territories of life that hold unquenchable power in my imagination: Marriage, sex, a steady paycheck, kids, success in concrete and fleshly terms… All these things can still claim to be the answer to everything that my life is about. I haven’t lived long enough to find out that they aren’t. Maybe that is why people rave about youth.
The bundles in our young hands unravel upward to balloons that are still floating innocently in the sky above our heads. I get the feeling that people who have lived longer find themselves more often than they would like hunched over collecting the little torn bits of rubber that are left after those balloons pop. I get the feeling that many of those hunched over people look at me in my youth and think “If only I could go back to those days when the balloons hadn’t popped, I could do it right and they would never pop.” I hear grief leaking out between their words when they marvel over my youth and try to convince me that it is the most valuable time of life.
I don’t agree with this outlook, though. I think that these balloons were meant to be popped. As long as there are years left to live there will be balloons that are popped. And it might not always be by disappointment! It might be by joy and fullness that looks different than I first thought. It might be tragedy or something less harsh but just as befuddling. It could really be anything. At this point in time I am still sitting on the unmarked end of what might be a string of these tragedies, disappointments and joys – and that, I think, is why they gush.
Here is how I think about it: Gravity and entropy are forces at work on our physical realities all the time, altering, changing, and securing things. Age is the force at work on our mental [balloon] pictures of what life will be. It is a natural force: why fight it?
I may be young, and I may have a flock of balloons above my head that I can’t chase away. But hear this older people, “not youth” and youth alike: those balloons will not be the point of my life. The sky above them is the point. You can rave all you want about my youth and how I don’t know how valuable it is, and I’ll miss it someday. I don’t care. I don’t plan on missing it. I plan on enjoying every gray hair, wrinkle and every popped balloon. I also plan on enjoying every moment until those other moments come. I plan to find life and joy in the undiscovered moments of every day, whether I’ve crossed the big finish lines of life or not and regardless of how desperate and disappointed they or their absence leave me feeling.
I will live for life itself, and not for the ideas and pictures and possibilities that cloak themselves in the disguise of “answers” to all that I am doubtful of and anxious about.
December 25th, 2007
There was no way to know that this moment would turn up like this right now, with this cast of characters forming this specific context. It is Christmas. So temporal, so short, so flimsy that I can see right through it. The flimsiness of it makes me want to break it. I know I can.
At the end of all things it means close to nothing – like a kid who does a job for a quarter. It is only a quarter. It is a piece of extra change, and if it got dropped behind the dresser no one would notice. Yet, to that kid it means the world. It is just a day, just a Christmas day in the 21st century. Like a kid who misunderstands currency, we place too much weight on a day.
But it is a day: a holiday, a remembrance day. A day to remember how involved, or not, we have been in our own lives as we face the close of another year. Well, here it comes: closing fast, closing tight with all its mountain peaks and valley depths, stationary, painted onto the canvas of our past. On the frame of this piece will be a little gold plated rectangle with the numbers 2-0-0-7 engraved into it. That will jog our memory as to the anatomy of the particular peaks and valleys years from now. Without that label it would blend into the last set, or the next set, or a set tens years ago.
At the end of my life I imagine myself walking down a long corridor, pausing at each frame with its own little number, and then I’ll look up and realize that despite the frames and three inches of wall between each, they become a solid stretching mountain range. One unbroken range lined up in front of me. Who but me – or you – could have scaled those peaks or waded those depths? They are all circumstances created that I climbed over or under or through. Each lake of tears that reveals my reflection and each sunburst of laughter painted throughout: they are mine. It is my painting, my life that I’ll look back on.
As I gaze towards 2008 I have no idea what to expect, and yet I know exactly what is coming: peaks, valleys, tears, laughter and all that will be painted in between. It won’t be easy. It never is. It won’t be ideal, but the real quality of the mess and the places that come up short are what make it me.
The life of a plant
The best things in life barely ever sprout fully grown. The things that surprise us with their good fullness usually don’t begin that way. Time is needed for discovery, exploration, formation, growth, maturity, and then finally figuring out how to reproduce. Some people try to speed up the process, thinking that until a plant bears fruit it can’t be considered a true plant. That, however, does not do justice to the life of these plants in our lives.
It is not a hard job for a plant to bear fruit. It is the natural function a plant, and a regular part of its life cycle. If the plant were to stop drinking or eating the nutrients from the soil or if it were to hide its face from the sun, only then would it stop bearing fruit. Much more would be wrong than a lack of fruit. It would not be able to live if this were the case. The life of a plant and the presence of fruit go together, like peas in a pod.
The fruit is not simply to look showy on the plant, or to taste good to those who eat it. Both of these characteristics are functions of the plant that allow it to spread its seed and multiply the amount of plants like itself. Once the fruit is eaten and enjoyed, the animal or person moves on and takes the seed with it. Then, a little ways down the road the seed will be deposited into new soil in a new place to begin the cycle all over again.
The purpose of fruit is to disseminate the seed, so that the plant can multiply. I find so many people are focused on how many pieces of fruit can be found on each branch of their lives, and so many people worried that theirs isn’t big enough yet – but I don’t know that I’ve ever come across many people who have thought further than that., and if its fulfilling its function as that. Whether fruit is present or not is not nearly as important as fruit that is present fulfilling its function.
Different trees have different fruit, and different fruit will attract different creatures to eat it. Some will be able to get through the tough outer wall to the good flesh inside of the durian, but others will stick to the ease and sweetness of the strawberry or blueberry or pear. Others will appreciate the tang of citrus, and still others will desire bananas more than anything. The variety of fruit is numerous, and so are the types and styles of consumers.
How dare we judge the differences in each other and the purposes of each other’s lives based on what we know to be true about our own? How dare we look down our noses at the shape or color or taste of another person’s fruit? How dare we brush each other off with a laugh if we don’t understand in the first minute?
We are in danger of discarding the odd or small looking out of the way plant because we haven’t seen it bear fruit yet. We are in danger of sticking to industrially produced quick-grow seed because we’ve seen it work before in other people’s lives. Or worse – we are in danger of discouraging each other to the point of abandoning who we are and what we love. We need to make space for the quirky small plant that takes longer to grow and spout and bear fruit. Homogeneity follows in the wake of impatience, and I am not willing to settle for that.
As for the plants in my life? I want to enjoy the discovery, the exploration and the formation of them. I want to revel in the growth and be able to love what they are in every stage they go through – from the smallest and unnoticed to the flashiest and obvious. I want to enable each person I come across to be able to do the same with their own.
