Rain

Each early summer, I write a letter to the firstborn daughter of one of my greatest friends.  I consider it a privilege, and since I haven't written much exclusively here of late, wanted to share - with her mother's generous permission - this year's message.  I took her name out, and replaced it as well as I could, but if the placeholders for the proper nouns sound awkward, this is why.  

Or, alternatively, it could just be me.

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My Dear, Sweet Girl,

 

You must hear this so often from your mom and dad, but you are growing up so, so quickly, before our very eyes.  I was able to see you this spring, which, though the circumstances were desperately far from ideal, was nonetheless a gift to me, and I was amazed at how tall you are, how beautiful your smile is, and how you are now beginning to become a young woman, rather than the little girl I remembered you to be.

I am writing this from our cabin nestled in the woods of northwestern Maine, where my husband is a Camp Director, and where we spend the summer months.  It is a beautiful place, and I hope that somehow, at some point, you will be able to see it in person.  If I ever doubt that there is an indescribably large and loving God, I simply have to think of this place, and I lose all doubt that it is true.  The world is often ugly and dark and disappointing, but nature is a priceless gift, and it is displayed in generous and flamboyant ways.   Wherever you find yourself as a young adult, I hope that you make time and find ways to wander in the outdoors.  I promise that it will nourish your soul.

Two things are happening here at this moment.  First, it is raining outside – so much more than a drizzle.  Coming down against my screen door is cats-and-dogs rain; the kind that thunders on the porch and amasses in puddles the size of swimming pools.   It is the type of rain that you dream about when you hike in the desert; the kind that you instinctively want to run from, and yet also the kind you recklessly want to run out into with arms open wide. 

Second, our faucet is leaking.  It is drip-drip-dripping into a two-liter soda bottle that I have strategically placed beneath it.  It has been leaking all morning (signs of a bigger problem, I’d guess), and I have been catching water in vessels of all shape and size in an effort to preserve it for things like flushing the toilet, washing dishes and making tea.  However, as I write this letter, the soda bottle has reached its fullness, and water is spilling out over its mouth and flowing down its side in a clean, single stream.  It is literally filled to overflowing.   It cannot hold even one drop more.

Life is like this sometimes.  There are periods in living when it seems like there are challenges pouring down by the bucketful.  When pain and obstacles refuse to stop coming, and they are overwhelming the space you have reserved for them, with no respect for your capacity or the strength of your walls.  It can feel like there is too much, almost, of everything, and just as I would feel if I were in this storm outside, you simply want a place to get out of the rain.

I often wish this weren’t true.  Life tends to feel simple when the skies are clear – love the people you are with, work hard at whatever you are given, and enjoy the small things [for they are the easiest to overlook] – but sooner or later, the heavens cloud over, and something moody and grave rolls over the mountain, blacking out those clear skies.  It is a difficult truth: you cannot run from trouble.  If not faced, it will always be waiting nearby, like that extra five pounds or spinach in your teeth.  Ironically, this is a fact we can all prove by looking at the lives around us, of people who have tried to escape it.  Avoiding obstacles, avoiding pain – this is always an illusion, because it is fact:  you will have trouble in this world.  It cannot be wished away.  It cannot be hidden from.  It will not disappear if you close your eyes.  Please, sweet girl, do not run from it.  Trouble is a patient adversary; it will wait for you, and will find when you when you’ve forgotten to be ready.

There is no easy answer to the affliction you are bound to experience in your life.  I wish there were.  When you face your pain, I guarantee that the grief will be sharp and deep and seem without end.  A challenge may require far more from you than you imagine having to give.  But please know that in the course of history, you stand in the company of a courageous assembly who have gone before you and have also overcome, and that, like a lighthouse on a rocky shore, you were built to withstand such a storm.  And also, like that lighthouse, know that your resilience will depend wholly on how tightly your footing is fastened to that stone.

I hope that you find something to believe in.  This is my most precious wish for you.   In my opinion, belief is like the mast of a ship in high swells or a compass in the deep forest.  In my life, I have been able to do more, with more freedom, enabled by a notion of belonging and purpose, than I could ever have imagined otherwise.  Granted, I haven’t climbed any Himalayan mountain or overcome a life-threatening injury, but I have adventured in my own ways, and been challenged and afraid and still felt incredible joy.  Human beings are capable of wonderful and fearfully astonishing things, Sweet Girl, but we are bound by skin and blood and bone and inevitably, we will swell and bruise and break.  Our bottle will overflow.  Our vessel will snap.

There are things that are inevitably beyond our control, and outside of our reach.  We are touched by violence and hatred, by disease and by injustice.  We are unfortunately, as a human race, also quite often the cause.  So while I believe firmly that there is a divine locket in each of us – a space designed to hold a sacred truth – I don’t feel that we have the truth in ourselves.  I know myself too well, and have searched there too long to think that I contain the answers I seek.  I think we have to go out to find the truth.  But – and this is the most important detail – the truth wants to be found.

Seek something in which to believe.  This world is complicated.  It is in one hand lush and awe inspiring, and in the other desolate and heartbreaking.  It will disappoint and hurt you.  Find what will ground you, and give you hope.  Search for what will fit precisely in that locket, for what will never leave you.  Find the stone on which to lay your lighthouse. 

And if and when you are curious to know where I have laid mine, I hope I will be here for you to ask.  This letter is written in a year of trial and deep sorrow for your family – a year when the rain came and was relentless.  I know that both they and I would cast our wishes to spare you from anguish like they have endured (and as their love is greater for you, I imagine their wishes also to be).  But each of us knows that like gravity, trouble is bound to come.  You will never climb a mountain unless you risk a scratch, unless you dance with disaster, just a little, and life is no different.  So what I aspire for you to learn through this year’s letter is that though your control in life is limited and your reach will fall short of changing your circumstance, what your soul believes in will determine your ability to overcome. 

Seek your hope, Sweet Girl.  Seek the truth. 

Find your shelter from the rain.

Listomania

I like lists.

Like this:

Laundry

Write

Library

Post office

Optician

Store: skim, yogurt, veg.

Get eggs @ Margie’s

Dinner

Clean up brush

Family bike ride?

Chase a naked Milo

I'm waiting for Chub Scout Retrieval to become an Olympic event.

This is just a sample.  I write these almost every morning, or in the evening for the next day.  When I’m really tired and/or lazy, they are extraordinarily short or include things like brew coffee (which, is actually done by the coffee maker - check, check!) and eat lunch, and only sometimes include showering.  

My good friend Jenn, besides being a phenomenal corn chip eater and artistic wondergirl is a listmaker, like me.  But beyond the daily cataloguing, Jenn is a bucket list girl.  She makes annual bucket lists, and also makes them when she moves a new place or perhaps even visits somewhere.  Her bucket list might include writing 365 letters in a year, eating at every Thai joint in Boston or, more likely, reading a number of phenomenal books and hiking mountains.  I think she’s brilliant.

Why do I think Jenn and I like lists so much?  In my opinion, it's because we are filled with a desire for purpose.  And in a tangible way, purpose means getting stuff done, amiright?  But - and this is a big but -  accomplishing my daily checklist is not the pinnacle of living.  

The lack of adrenaline rush after crossing out Do the dishes is a dead giveaway. 

If my life is composed of list after list after list, with 365 each year for an ambitious 60 more years, that’s 21,900 lists, not including each leap year.  I might like lists, but that sounds… completely terrible.  It is essentially repetitive, it makes my soul feel heavy, and it is – correct me if I’m wrong – totally anticlimactic. 

Here’s my dilemma.  I am not a girl with huge aspirations – perhaps I’m hard to inspire, but I think probably I’m simply too indecisive, passive and easily satisfied, which are a secret Keebler recipe for generally mundane things, showcased by the list I posted above.  So why am I knocking on lists like that, and yet I’m praising the likes of Jenn’s big, bad bucket lists?  

Why?  

First off, despite their monotony, your daily tasks are not qualitatively bad.  Without them, my world might stop turning - certainly the laundry cycle would.  That, said, it's easy to get lost in the rhythm of these familiar, sometimes automatic behaviors.  The problem is, I need help.  I won't remember to go get the eggs without a note, and so I certainly doubt that I'll really go travel the world without a reminder to book the first flight.  I need the benefit of my ink lettering staring me in the face, like a glowing neon light, to beckon me to go get after it.   

I am however, suggesting something a little less explosive.

This is why Jenn’s bucket lists are such an inspiration, and why I need to write a few of my own.  If I finally get down on paper that I want to hike Mount Washington before next winter, and I have to stare at it - stare at it, stare at it, stare at it - every day… you know what?  I might actually get that sucker done.  And what makes those bucket lists so special is that the true success is not simply the accomplishment in checking the items off.  It’s part of the ploy, yes, because we are human and sometimes need a carrot to chase after, but unlike the old illustration, somehow grabbing hold of that carrot – checking off that thing - is not actually the prize.  We don’t feel the reward when we scribble through learn to swim the butterfly or cross out join a traveling carnival.  We feel it while we are chasing after the carnival.  While we are powerfully fluttering our way across the pool.  While we are huffing our reluctant body up toward the Washington Observatory.   The chase is our reward. 

The prize is the thing itself.    

So don’t quit making your lists.  I’m certainly going to keep it up, or I promise you that you’ll never come over to our place for breakfast, because I will 

never 

have 

gone 

to get those eggs.  

But beyond the daily grind, let’s do two things together.  First, let’s sprinkle some bucket inspiration onto our daily notepad, so that we remember to Paint a masterpiece with the Chub Scout or Take over the world in Risk later that day.  Second, let’s get cracking on this year’s bucket list.  There are incredible things in store for 2015 – adventure and adrenaline and hilarity and mountaintops – even for a lazy Susan like me.  So here, as a gesture of goodwill, is the beginning of mine:

1.  Hike Mt. Washington 

2.  Overnight camp with Milo

3.  Grill a really good steak  

If you want to post a couple of your bucket items here, that would be a pretty great encouragement to me.  And when the time comes that you accomplish them, don't flaunt the fact that you checked them off.  Flaunt the story.  Tell it to me, and to your friends, and to your family.  Because that's the prize.  And maybe, just maybe if you can get after it, so can we.