Wish Says, 'Gotta Keep Movin'

My Aunt Joycie used to be integral to the coordination of an event in Tulsa called the Wish Lemons run.

The run was designed to raise money for missions, and it fit Wish well because he himself was an avid runner. On all the cups and t-shirt designs, his mantra, "Gotta Keep Movin'" made you feel like you could actually accomplish something.

Moving isn't running, isn't sprinting, isn't jogging. Moving is determined progress in an intentional direction.

You may be wondering if this is a post about running (it isn't, but I'll get there), since I've mentioned my running progress more than once recently, though I did, in fact, complete a 5K with my coworkers without walking once:

It was on the coast of Florida, and it felt like I was chewing my oxygen.

My stamina is pretty pathetic generally.
It took two months of training with the Couch to 5K app to be able to do it.
Have I run since?
No.
Running is the worst.

More to the point, though, building stamina through slow determination and a time-oriented goal can be really helpful.

If I had been asked to run a 5K in a week's time, I would have been miserable. Miserable miserable miserable. There would have been shin splints, vomit, walking, stopping, and a lot more complaining. Because I hadn't run in multiple years really. At least not with any consistency.

The app started me slow. Lots of walking, with spurts of running, just short enough that they were doable, but just long enough that they winded you.

By the end, I could do it. I did do it.

Reading is something that has been important to be since long before I could actually read. Words, movement of language, poetry, the poetry of communication, the communication of poetic experience. I love it. I have felt more known by books and language than by other people for most of my life. It's interwoven with my identity.

Then it was tidal waved out of my life.

There comes a point of fear when we realize that what we thought was a temporary phase of complacent mediocrity has become a sturdy "normal".

My diet of philosophy, history, historical fiction, modern poetry, creative nonfiction, and science fiction became replaced by pinterest, twitter, and facebook status updates. Neither my eyes nor my attention span could hold on for much longer than 8 or so seconds.

Scroll scroll scroll.
I missed movement, but I couldn't move.
Depression robs you of all you love.
Worse, it  makes you feel as though you weren't robbed but rather have made a choice to abandon.

Perhaps because that's easier than admitting the truth. It's better, you think, to claim you have power, even if in doing so you're communicating that you knowingly want to make the choices that your life is now characterized by.
For me, that's been lethargy, apathy, and mass consumption of the digital world.

Where I had read nearly 60 books in 4 months, the next 4 were only 20, reduced to 8 in the 8-9 months after.
I can't even tell you how many more I started and failed to progress past the first chapter. Didn't even make it through the first chapter, actually.

My pen was just as dusty as my bookshelf. I used to fill pages a day with thoughts and curiosity and updates.

There's not a record of the existence of this past year. I have nothing to say.

Frustration with myself grew.
Grew.
Grew.
Grew.
Grew.
Grew.

Is there a point in frustration that frustration becomes your new identity?
Where your words about your inabilities become who you are?

Yeah.

There is.

I also wasn't being very fair to myself.
The books I was choosing were either far above my "reading level" or so far below that they were children's books that I had already read.
Neither are something to build momentum on.

Then, I don't know, I chose one that looked fun and easy, but it was new and interesting, too.
And I finished it.
In two weeks.

After that, I finished A General Theory of Love, which I had started in October and a bunch more technical. The next day.

Two days after that, I finished a book on the history of JBU, which I had started a year to the day that I had started both the book and my work at JBU.

Then I started a totally new one last Thursday, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. And finished it yesterday.

That's more consistent reading than I have done in more than a year.
My pen has been more active, too, beginning to fill up the final pages of a tiny journal that's taken me more than a year to fill a quarter of.

It's now been a year since I moved back to The States.
This is the first time in that space or even more than I have begun to feel a return out of the ditches of my dead mindedness and back to me. I'm starting to feel ebbing relief in knowing that the part of me I love most isn't lost for good.

I no longer feel defeated. I feel like moving.

Remember Your Editor

I have now worked at JBU for exactly a year.

It's fitting that today I should find myself helping to train our new counselor: sending her informational emails/templates/codes, helping her learn the day to day and mark her calendar for different fairs and school events.

In this year, I have learned a lot.
Basics such as how to look like a professional (still a work in progress), how to plan for travel season, how to fill my desk days. I've also learned how to make a shower floor shine white, how to plan a weekly food menu, and how to solve my lava-hot room problem by picking out functional (and cute) thermal curtains.

It's been a good chapter, but it didn't start out that way.

During the first draft, there were late mornings, nose rings, frozen chimichangas, late nights, and a lot of energetic flailing.

Each month, each chapter section, brought changes wrought by many editors: my bosses, my housemates, my family, my friends, my God, and myself.

A good writer recognizes the reality of the "shitty first draft". The SFD is the first go-round of thoughts in the book writing process, and usually the most excitable.
Ink pours out of you, as new characters, setting details, and big picture ideas spurt into your right brain.

There's all this stuff!! All this new!! And for a while, you think it's the best thing ever brought into creation.
Until you meet your editor.

Enter: opposition.

They give you feedback you usually aren't ready to accept graciously (or at all), and you emotionally recoil and fight back vehemently, defending your paragraphs like a banshee.

All alone later, though, you take a look back at what you've created.
There's been enough distance now that, "Oh gosh...my editor was right", and you start implementing their corrections, awkwardly at first until you learn to merge your voice with their ideas. You practice and you correct till it begins to feel natural, as though it had been you all along.

We finish and we forget: this chapter isn't ours.
Without our editors, we would have pages full of microwaveable Mexican food, unprofessional-ism, the wrong addresses, lethargy, loneliness, and exhaustion.

Our editors bring with them momentary anxiety, frustration, pain, and sometimes embarrassment, but they are the ones who turn our outlines into books.

In the Human

People ask me all the time how I spend my days in the office.

If I'm not travelling, what could I possibly be doing?

The answer is, I answer emails, text messages, and phone calls from anxious parents and students trying to figure out all of life's challenging questions like, "Where do I send my shot records?", "Which of my clep courses will transfer as credit?", and "Where is the best place to buy twin xl sheets?"

Even if I've met them before, after that 16th email exchange, it's hard for me to keep my students (and their parents) in my mind as real life people. It makes it difficult to remember to respond to them as though they were human beings with feelings and anxieties.
It's difficult to remember that I once felt similarly, just stuffed with over roommates, refrigerators, and registration.

This past weekend, I tried to play a video game with the beau and, despite telling him that I had never played it and hadn't actually played any video game in years, his instructions were bare minimum. At each turn, I would ask ten more questions, and he would give me answers with words for which I had no foundation of definition, leaving me more confused. I didn't know how to move or shoot or what my goal was in each level or even which direction I was supposed to be heading. And there he was in the split screen below me kicking butt (He may not have actually been, but to someone having her butt kicked, everything above that seems awesome).

We finally paused the game for a tutorial when I got irked at his partial answers and explanations, and he admitted he hadn't played with someone that unacquainted with games in a really long time, so he hadn't thought through totally how basic he had needed to answer.

I'm only so calm about it all now because I've made college my profession. I know all the ins and outs and professors and it came from experience and training. These little greens don't know that. They have no foundation for that and neither do their parents, if this is their first kid headed off to college.

When I answer the phone or the thirteenth text in a row with (what I think are the dumbest ever) questions, I need to remember that I have the opportunity to serve them, relieve their anxiety, get them excited and not afraid, and give them all a sense that they are making the right decision.

Other than a kind email, there is little emotional "return" in my job.
That's okay, I'll keep doing it despite that, we don't need a hug and box of chocolates for being sufficient, but by the nature of my business, sometimes it can feel like nothing we do matters.

You work closely with a family for 11 months and they drop last minute.
You work with them as hard as you can, and they tell you you're their back up back up back up school and they'll come if they have to (local students).
You communicate with them about the importance of choosing a university for it's community and professors instead of major (they're 18. It'll most likely change), and they drop you for some low-grade school you know they'll hate.

This weekend, though, was early registration.
600 people on campus, 319 students registered.
All but four of mine showed up.

And they take selfies on your phone and they cry and tell you how thankful they are for you and they tell you how you've become part of their family and they talk about you at the dinner table. And they're THERE, in the human, not a text, email, or transcript, not a number.

And suddenly, there seems to be a lot more room for grace.

Reimagined Dragons

Tiny humans are the worst.

Not short people, though I'm sure there are some terrible short people, and I don't appreciate it when two heightless people stand on either side of me and talk. I can't hear a dang thing up here in the troposphere. 

I'm talking about small children. 

Walmart/Aldi/Movie Theaters/Parks/Pools just all the things. They're sticky, they scream (oh Lord they scream), and they decide that your approaching car is the perfect moment to run into the street. 

Sometimes, I think, "Parenthood, that sounds like a thing I want in on someday." 

Then I go to the grocery store and see a mom with four tiny monsters running around shrieking like they're being kidnapped because they can't buy a box of sugar-based breakfast food (because they need more energy reserves) and bless God for my current celibacy. 

After my most recent run-in (run from) involving the small jam-covered ones, I decided to re-brand them. 

You know what I think are cute? Dragons. They're adorable. Have you ever seen "Dragon Tales" or "How to Train Your Dragon"? Just the cutest. Baby dragons are all bumping around, accidentally breathing fire, shrieky, and clumsy. Precious. 

Since then, I've started pretending that horrible little children are just baby dragons, and they have become so much more tolerable to me. 

Sometimes, it takes a change of perspective. 

You'll never catch those grammar errors in your paper, you've been looking too long. Change the font and try again. 

You never noticed the homeless people in your own city before but change the venue and they're everywhere. 

It's easier, I think, to notice and to have compassion for that which we have had little exposure to, like the irony in "The Help" where the white women are raising money for the starving children in Africa but neglect to recognize as barely even human the black folk who serve them. 

It isn't right, and it isn't fair, but you may not even recognize the disparity in your thinking. That doesn't give you an excuse, but it does help give some context to what may appear to others as hypocritical. 

I know my baby dragon theory is fanciful and silly, but occasionally, re-branding the familiar (even to whimsical levels) can help you appreciate or "see" just a little bit more clearly.