Like Dante, like Frost, I have found myself in a place where the roads diverge.
I never imagined it would be like this.
There’s a dream at the end of the road and some worldly forces that I cannot see will, in their own good time, set the roads straight and guide me to whichever is the right one. The right one for the place and the time for the moment in which the earth turns. To some degree, all are somewhat travelled. To quite a different degree, all are untrod.
What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
The question brought me to tears. One road was suddenly harder to see.
How do you see yourself in ten years’ time?
Depending on the day, I may or may not know. That’s a lie. I know. I know.
There’s a dream along each road, and there many are when I stop to count, but I cannot knit them together into the picture that fills my mind when I can’t sleep. Maybe the dreams are wrong or misunderstood or misinterpreted. And maybe the roads that I see are not the roads I need to see.
Can you hear the universe when it speaks?
Whyte says these are questions that have no right to go away.
My questions swirl. Ebb, flow. Some days, sunshine. Some days, rain. Dark self-doubt and hello, demons.
Opportunity? Possibility?
There’s a dream out there waiting to be shaped, molded, given a life and a home and a place to rest. There’s a dream out there to be discovered, explored, cherished.
I have found myself in a place where the roads diverge and a map is nowhere to be seen.
is the possibility for something different, something new, something untried, unseen, unfelt. Hope is the catharsis of tropical rain.
Yesterday I had a conversation with an old friend, probably the most adaptable person I know. “I could be angry,” she said, “but that’s just not how I want to be and it doesn’t solve my problem.” A few hours later, I had a conversation with a student who is really struggling with some personal issues. We talked about life and the universe, about meaning and goals, and about what’s left in the world after a goal is accomplished. Just before the end of the day, I had a conversation with another student about the future, a young man who has confidently and quietly made choices and is looking forward to the adventure to come. In the evening I talked with another friend who is considering, as I am, choices that could go anywhere and nowhere.
There are two common threads here and both have struck a chord with me. The first is that sharing and conversing with others, and especially young people, give my life so much meaning. I may not have solved any problems today but there are doors open wide, an invitation to listen, a shoulder to cry on. These connections with other human beings are vital to my sense of personhood, which is to be part of a wider world and walk hand in hand with those I encounter.
The second thread is that all of these conversations, though vastly different in content and tone, were sparked by the hope that there is something else if we’re willing to look for it. There are possibilities if we are willing to do the hard work of asking questions, making changes, beginning again, or beginning differently. And there is the excitement of a world yet to be lived and explored. If there were not hope, none of us would be talking in the first place.
Sunshine
is the golden bubbles that arise out of nowhere and feel like childhood. Sunshine is a periwinkle sky in the evening and the delight of an unsigned thank you note.
When I was little my mum told us how, growing up, she used to wash her long, wavy hair outside in the rain. I went out with a shampoo bottle once but I don’t remember it working very well. Not too long ago I changed into my bathing suit and joined a friend outside in a downpour, one of those rainstorms that quite literally takes your breath away. During a recent and memorable bike ride, it was all we could do to keep our eyes open as we, and everyone else caught in the sudden deluge, giggled and called out to one another, strangers, recognising the shared joy that filled the air.
Last night I decorated Christmas cookies and a gingerbread house with friends and I learned that icing melts quickly in the tropics and that one should put a base layer of icing on the tree-shaped cookie before adding candy ornaments.
Moments that allow us to laugh and play with abandon, to forget our adult decorum and our worries and responsibilities, are moments of sunshine.
Magic
is elusive if you’re looking because it can’t be seen. But magic is omnipresent if you believe it’s real.
Sometimes we say the same thing at the same time. We pick up the phone just as it rings. We send the same story or recommend the same book. Once we learn a new word, we suddenly see it everywhere. If we did it on purpose it wouldn’t happen this way, but it happens all the time when we’re just willing to be.
But sometimes I think we’re afraid of magic. We’re afraid to admit that we don’t have as much control as we wanted, or that there are forces in the universe we can’t explain. And this keeps us from the opportunities to get to know ourselves and others in such a way that allows magic to happen.
And so I ask: What could the world hold if we dared let it?
When I was fifteen and for several years thereafter, one of my summer jobs was working in my dad’s office. It was mind-numbing, repetitive, thoughtless, meaningless work and I made my opinion of it known at home. My parents looked at me and smiled. “Stay in school,” they said. Lesson learned.
Desperately browsing my dad’s bookshelves one lunchtime for anything that was not a medical journal, I came across a volume bound in green leather with gold lettering. The Chosen by Chaim Potok, a signed copy. I asked my dad about it and he told me it was a novel. “Read it,” he said. I’ve always been a reader of everything, a lover of words and stories and the truth to be found in the pages of books, and so I did.
It never returned to my dad’s bookshelf.
Over the years, I read The Chosen many, many times. Devoured it each time like it was the first time. Drank in the story of two boys who became friends in adverse circumstances, two boys who grew into men, who didn’t fit into their worlds, who asked questions, who made immense choices. I read this book over and over and over.
By the time I was a senior in high school, this was listed as my favourite book on a poster announcing students of the month. (My favourite song listed on that poster, “Hallelujah”, is still my favourite and I remain partial to the Rufus Wainwright version even though it doesn’t cut to the soul in the of way Jeff Buckley’s recording, or just about anything else about Jeff Buckley.)
Most of my best-loved books are stored in my parents’ basement. There’s only so much room in shipping containers when you’re bound by cubic metres. But The Chosen has always come along even though I haven’t read it in many, many years. Recently, that changed. And again, I devoured it. It spoke, as it always had, in my bones.
Over the years I’ve been told I’m amoral, but that I care too much; that I stand strongly, but for the wrong values; that I’m misguided and confused, steady and responsible; I’m callous and too sensitive, selfish and too giving.
As with horoscopes, if you are vague enough yet inclusive with adjectives, something’s going to fit.
But I came back to this book just recently and whatever it was that spoke to me at age fifteen spoke again, fifteen years later. I’m really not so different. Older and wiser having lived, but not so different. What I understood at fifteen still reverberates: I’ve known for a long time that something in me, the deepest part of me, is searching.
This search is not one of loss or sorrow, but one of conviction and purpose. The defining difference now is that I know what I’m looking for and I know that the right thing to do is continue voyaging.
And so when I responded to this novel in the same way that I did at fifteen, I recognised with wonder that my feet are firmly planted, even as I wander in a world that spins.
By Rebecca Michelle 