This column first appeared in The Finger Lakes Times, Upstate New York regional newspaper:
I desperately want a straight path with two wagon ruts smoothed into it and a little prairie grass growing in between. I want to get on that path and walk toward the horizon, able to look off into the distance and know where I am going.
It is not going to happen.
I was explaining to a member of the staff at my church that I struggle with forms. She wisely suspected as much, having been a teacher and observing my little methods of compensating (or not) for slight life-long learning disabilities. The ubiquitous pink notepads, for example, for writing down phone messages requires just a little too much concentration so I turn them over and use the blank side.
But secretly I desire the comfort of living within the lines because I imagine it would take so much less energy and I would not have to keep re-inventing just about everything I do.
It is not going to happen.
Still I lust for a routine that works. The only two routinized pieces of my life that have ever succeeded over time are connected to writing. My sermon practice and my writing practice, when I’m not in transition, more or less live within lines I have drawn. I say more or less because I continuously fall outside the routine and have to put myself back in it. Yet they are definitely two wagon tracks that have formed a path forward while everything else is willy-nilly and responsive to the demands and needs of other people, places, or things.
So I look at people who go to the same place at the same time every day and do an assortment of the same things, and imagine it to be a softer, lusher lawn to walk on. I look at people with a linear career they charted out long ago and followed, and wonder how they did it. I remember my dad trying to teach me how to make sharp neat corners for boxes and frames and the frustration that mine never came together like his did. I visit friends in their homes who do amazing and beautiful things with wood (requiring straight lines and perfect angles) and marvel.
Whether the circuitous route I walk or the straight line traversed by others, learning to be comfortable in the skin that holds us, and at ease in the mind that shapes us, is the key that unlocks the door to peace. There is considerable wisdom waiting for us on the other side of that door too.
And sometimes I find it.
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