Every day I bike up the hill, which takes 5 minutes longer than biking down. Every day I sweat less, every day my thighs burn less. Every day I (with Ann's help, most days) cook something delicious for dinner. Usually it is also (relatively) cheap and healthy, and it's not ever heavy.
These are small things, at first glance, survival things, mundane "everyday" things. But they mean that I am capable and that I have at least made the first cut in the contest to survive. I am, if not the fittest, then I am among the fitter.
I'm making progress in big ways, too. Those of you who know me well know I hardly make it through one single day without working through something. (As Ann and I are starting to realize, this can sometimes be a tripwire, like when we don't know how to be at peace since we're both so comfortable working through things.) But we're staging rituals to burn hurtful parts of our past, we're budgeting, we're learning different ways to cook meat. We break a lot of glass items, but that happens, right? And at least I'm not doing that at work... (Knock on wood!)
It took me at least 2 1/2 years to own at St. Olaf, to feel on top of that world. But it truly was that world I had mastered. And mastery, even there, didn't mean I wasn't still tripping and stumbling left and right.
This has been happening every 3-5 years for quite some time now: we spend a few years as underlings, gradually making our way to the select elite for a year -- only to be plunged into a bigger pool where we constitute, once again, the bottom of the food chain. Such are the joys of the American educational system.
Right now, I am a fish of undetermined size in a pool of undetermined size. I feel fairly strongly, now that I'm thinking about it, that I am not the algae on the sides of said pool; but by no means am I familiar with the terrain enough to avoid colliding with a pirate shipwreck or being chomped by barracuda. I have 3 months -- two, now -- to get acquainted with this seafloor, and I want nothing more than to do so. And then the task will fall upon me to figure out how this particular seafloor fits into the bottom of the global ocean.
To a fearless explorer, this task presents merely an exciting challenge. But when I'm not entirely sure who I am and what skills I have that are relevant outside of the Situational Own (St. Olaf), it's a bit daunting. I hardly know where to start.
So far, the answer has been "somewhere," and that's worked just fine so far. But I'm starting to realize that I need a heading if I hope to ever capitalize that S: Somewhere, here I come.
These are small things, at first glance, survival things, mundane "everyday" things. But they mean that I am capable and that I have at least made the first cut in the contest to survive. I am, if not the fittest, then I am among the fitter.
I'm making progress in big ways, too. Those of you who know me well know I hardly make it through one single day without working through something. (As Ann and I are starting to realize, this can sometimes be a tripwire, like when we don't know how to be at peace since we're both so comfortable working through things.) But we're staging rituals to burn hurtful parts of our past, we're budgeting, we're learning different ways to cook meat. We break a lot of glass items, but that happens, right? And at least I'm not doing that at work... (Knock on wood!)
It took me at least 2 1/2 years to own at St. Olaf, to feel on top of that world. But it truly was that world I had mastered. And mastery, even there, didn't mean I wasn't still tripping and stumbling left and right.
This has been happening every 3-5 years for quite some time now: we spend a few years as underlings, gradually making our way to the select elite for a year -- only to be plunged into a bigger pool where we constitute, once again, the bottom of the food chain. Such are the joys of the American educational system.
Right now, I am a fish of undetermined size in a pool of undetermined size. I feel fairly strongly, now that I'm thinking about it, that I am not the algae on the sides of said pool; but by no means am I familiar with the terrain enough to avoid colliding with a pirate shipwreck or being chomped by barracuda. I have 3 months -- two, now -- to get acquainted with this seafloor, and I want nothing more than to do so. And then the task will fall upon me to figure out how this particular seafloor fits into the bottom of the global ocean.
To a fearless explorer, this task presents merely an exciting challenge. But when I'm not entirely sure who I am and what skills I have that are relevant outside of the Situational Own (St. Olaf), it's a bit daunting. I hardly know where to start.
So far, the answer has been "somewhere," and that's worked just fine so far. But I'm starting to realize that I need a heading if I hope to ever capitalize that S: Somewhere, here I come.
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