Happiness is: Haley

I've known my best friend Haley for two decades now. 

Fairly, the first was spent in bitter enmity. She'll recall my bossiness, I recall her wild ways.

When you grow up, though, sometimes the things that prevented friendship are the very parts that keep it together.

Tempered, my bossiness turned into a general maintenance of stability.

Tempered, she learned to understand when to whip out the fun.

Together, we can go out or stay in and make a party out of anything, keeping it small (for me) but raucous (for her).

My mom loves when Haley is around because she's the only person who can evoke a true gut laugh from me, and so easily.

I love when Haley is around because everything seems to have more sparkle and sun when she's with me.

It's been a really long time since we've gotten to hang out but have pieced our long distance together through phone calls and Pinterest and the single hour we shared in person a month or so ago when she was down for her sister's wedding.

It was a great relief and great joy, then, to hear she was coming down from Denver and coming over to me in Arkansas for a day.

I got off work early, we girl talked, went grocery shopping, made enchiladas, went on a run to Goodwill for a Twister search that ended in a blue sequin spandex onesie, had friends over, ate ice cream on the kitchen floor, played games, and talked late into the night.

Growing up can be especially hard on friendships, as you move around or move out of them.

It makes you especially thankful for those friendships which grow with you, flex and form and flow.

It's Good to be Smart

It's better to be kind.

The wife of my smallgroup leader, a lady named Heather, was a teeny tiny, quiet woman with a gush of energy inside her, helpful considering she has two boys and now a sweet little girl.

My second semester in Belfast, Heather really took after me, bringing me over for tea, getting me little gifts (like a measuring cup with American conversion rates on it, so I could bake easier), and just showing me kindness.

In small group, she didn't talk a whole lot--I would definitely put her on highly on the introvert scale. But one-on-one, she really connected well with others. I was most thankful for her.

One time, when we were talking about her older son who is wicked smart, she told me that with her boy, she is often drawn to tell him, "It is good to be smart; it is better to be kind."

Being someone who has been born into American competitiveness, a culture where getting ahead by whatever means possible is the only way, this was kind of shocking to me to hear a mother praising her son's braininess but pushing him toward a lifestyle characterized not by wits but by wisdom and gentleness.

In a month, I'll have all 58 of my new students (450 overall oh my goodness) arriving on campus. Some of them I know to be both very smart and very kind. Some are very kind and lack in educational prowess. Others, I know to be intelligent but I have some doubts as to their inter-social tendencies.

I guess as an education facilitator, I'm supposed to cheer on the smart ones. That makes sense. They're the ones who supposedly will do best here.

I was one of those.

But was I kind?

At my core, kindness and gentleness toward others is something very important to me. The manifestation of that, though, is something I have had to work hard to express well.

You see, I can't make myself get on-board with the smarties. Life is more than being smart. University community, not just high data GPAs and test scores, is what makes being at college "the best four years of your life".

Curious, kind students who want to learn and connect beat out brilliance.

Naturally being the best can lead you to believe that you don't need help, that you don't need to connect, that you don't need contribute and respond. And the worst part is, you don't even see that that is hurting you longterm. You see it as a point of pride that you have all that you need tucked inside you.

The thing is, that doesn't stay inside the classroom.
We aren't as compartmentalized as we would like to believe.

Who we are inside BBL_3003 directly relates to who we are at home or church or work.

It all comes down to who we believe we are.

If you believe yourself to be someone entirely self-sufficient, when push comes to shove in your relationship, will you not pull away, throw up walls, and cut out your significant other from relating to you, helping you, or making decisions with you? Will you not turn away from God in the rough times because you can fix the problem better yourself? Will you not miss out from good ideas from coworkers when you are working on a new project?

We are build to relate to one another and to fail and to learn together.
It is good for us to be smart, but it is better for us to be kind.

F is for Fitness

And other words.

My two housemates and I are often on vastly differing schedules from one another, and that often causes us to pass like ships in the night. If we didn't like each other, this would actually be pretty nice, but we do like each other.

For this reason, M and I decided to go on a run last night, despite the fact that it is 1000 degrees of humid outside, and neither of us have run in over a month and never super consistently before that (save my training for my 5K).

And, because we love her, we invited S, too, who apologized profusely for how slow she was, for how she trots instead of runs, and how she was going to inevitably slow us down.

M and I assured her that our "running" was really more of a meander, how our ideal run involved 3 minutes running, 3 minutes walking.

S started the canter straight out of the gate, and we didn't stop until we reached home 3.4 miles later.

We lost M after mile 2--it was a valiant effort.
I'm not sure how I held on, but I'm putting it to sheer curiosity. I really wanted to see how long S was going to hold out for. Forever is the answer. I'm pretty sure she could have gone farther and faster than her pace due to me.

When we turned on to our street, she told me she was going to speed up a bit. That's fine, I thought, I'll speed up a bit too.

She disappeared in some kind of time warp.

When I reached the house, the two of us turned around and walked to go find M.

The moral of the story is, when someone makes apologies for their running, ask more questions or you will end up on an impromptu 5K.

Yard Work and Summer Good Feels

At Glenwood Gables, our yard owns us.

A few months ago, I attacked two of the three enormous bushes (fondly known as Monster and Devil).
They grew back.

We poured poison on them, chocked their roots full of epsom salt before a rain storm, hacked at them.

They grew. In fact, our efforts seemed to fuel them.

Monster grew back with a vengence and took over a huge section of the back corner.

And then there's Demon.
Trunk to tip thorns, and it was growing by the day, gaining speed and covering an entire kitchen window as well as part of the gate to the fence.

I don't think they would have bothered me so much, but from my spot at the kitchen table, they were all that I could see.

I needed them dead.
I needed backup.

Enter: The Julius.
We put our bets on him, and we were proven correct with our choice.

Down went Demon.

The garden was a whole other situation, and Makayla (and some me as well, but I mostly handled the irises and a strange buried stack of bricks that was preventing mowing) tackled it with perseverance weeding, cutting down the outer levels of grass, and mulching.

We're all very busy and usually stressed (the life of an introvert doesn't take much to overwhelm) but finally our house is starting to look less like a fairy tale villain lair and more like a cozy cottage, complete with gnome.

Then, with our two-day yard work extravaganza done, we went to the pool, put together some delicious homemade pizza, played games, and napped.

Happiness is: friendship and achieving goals.

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.