Hold on to These

It has been so long since I last wrote that it is somewhat difficult to accumulate the entire semester into a short blog, but here's an attempt.

Sentence I thought up in a hotel room in Birmingham:

"Sometimes when I go to sleep, I hope that when I wake up the world will be different. It never is."

Sentence I said to my mom in order to explain my biggest conflict:

"To be in the world, I have to be a dietitian, but to be myself, I have to be a writer."

And these both inspired an excerpt in ch. 6 of the novel to be:

"It didn’t matter much though since she never came. I might have sat there for hours. I can’t really remember, but I know it was for a long time. I got there some time in the late afternoon and I was still sitting there at sunset. I felt that ache again, that god awful, gnawing ache. I wanted something, I wanted it so badly and I didn’t even know what it was. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to want something just for the heck of wanting something, or if there was something in me that actually needed to want something. I know, it’s confusing. I was hungry, and I didn’t know what for. And I can’t explain it unless you’ve felt it too."

Apathetic. That's how I would describe life in the beginning of this semester. It wasn't intentional, it was incidental. It's a strange feeling, to be apathetic I mean.

Apathetic-"feeling no interest, enthusiasm, or concern"

I had always figured that to be apathetic, you'd have to be dead, in a coma, sleepwalking. It always seemed quite impossible for me to imagine a living, breathing, human being as being without feeling or numb. Ah, but I was wrong.

Some consider apathy as synonymous with heartless, but that is not the case, so I have learned. Apathy is more like not knowing where to put your heart. The heart is homeless, not dead. It's still beating, it just doesn't know what it's beating for. And without the knowing, witout the thump, thump, thump, it becomes monotonous, rhythmic. No more rises and falls, no more skips or jumps. And it was the rise and fall, skips and jumps, that gave the apathetic heart something to feel in the first place.

With that in mind, it is very simple to become apathetic. All one must do is subit to the tick of a clock, the schedule, the "plan," and then, apathy is easly adapted into ones life without hastle or consideration.

I would say that my month long apathetic heart was in consequence of not knowing where I fit in the future. Where do I want to live? Where do I want to go? Where should I be? How will it all work out? Questions like those, when unfelt, and not readily answered, lead to the feeling of apathy.

I wanted to want something, and I wanted to want it badly enough to run after it, chase after it, fall after it...but I didn't know what it was. And when you don't know what it is, when nothing makes your heart skip or race or jump, there's nothing left but the quiet and calm of apathy.

Fortunately, even though I am no seer, and I STILL cannot predict my future, the feeling of apathy has left because I want again. And it's the wanting that keeps us alive. The chase, the hunt, the run.

Chase after God.
The dream.
The novel.
The internship.
The friend.
The love.
Literally run somewhere...

And the steady thump, thump of my heart became strong again, and faster. And apathy was replased with that child-like hope of what's to come.

Driving home over Thanksgiving break, I felt remarkable. The sky was blue, the air light, and in the midst of the road, I felt something like joy in my heart. I felt many things, but the point was that I felt anything at all.

I received a wonderful letter earlier this year from a friend. She wrote about black birds flying in a circle in a gray sky, and how the flying birds reminded her not to give in to the 5:00 o'clock job, the "life." But, I think more than anything, the life she was speaking of was an apathetic one. A life where one's dreams, and hopes, and wants drown in countless coffee refills, and tapping pencils on the top of plastic desks, and empty sighs.

Maybe our biggest fear of growing up is not to find ourselves in tiny cubicles, surrounded by ties and skirts of the same black and gray hues, but to find ourselves empty, apathetic.

"When you grow up, your heart dies."

That's what the brunnett with weird eating habits and brown eyes says in The Breakfast Club. Maybe she really is on to something. Maybe children dread growing old, not because driving isn't fun, or wearing suits is a bore, but because they don't want to trade running with their arms wides open for that cross-legged, hand-clasped sit.

Apathy- "feeling no interst, apathy, or concern."

But if I were to define it, I would say that apathy is when your heart falls asleep. And the best way to wake up a sleeping heart is to squeeze it so tight with the beauty, and the dreams, and the deliciousness of life that it cannot do anything else but wake up.

In the moments you are given, really live. And when they are over, hold on.