Fractures of Life

Basking in the hot, slow days of summer has given me some time to contemplate, to reflect. I think about my proclivity towards a cynicism of sorts about life. My desire is to be a positive, patient, meditative person, for I feel a life uninspected is a life not fully lived. Yet I constantly feel like my mind is drawn towards the negative, the “hopeless”, and life feels like it is filled with one impasse after another.

It often feels like my life is a composition of swiftly finished novellas – like hundreds of short stories that relate in a nonsensical way. Many of the moments I so cherished ended more quickly than I foresaw, and others carried on longer than I felt was necessary. Some because I ended them and others because they just ended.

I think back to my early days of athletics with a feeling of pride towards my abilities, yet also with a weighty sense of failure. It always seemed I could never stick to just one sport, I was always excelling at something and then quitting to move on to the “next best thing”. The positive man would look at my life and say, “Ahh, what a beautiful compilation of differing experiences, each which must have molded you in a distinct and marvelous way!”, but that oh so present and ever cynical voice inside me thinks instead, “Why couldn’t you just freaking carry one thing out – just finish something.”

I think back to all the years I put into training to be an elite runner. Running was always a love hate thing with me. I loved feeling free and away from the world. But I hated the pressure, the monotony, the isolation, the expectations, and the lack of freedom with my own future. For much of my high school career, I asked that I please not have to run anymore. The answer from my dad and coach – no, you’re doing this. Period. I cried, I walked through practices to show my defiance, but at the end of the day the fact remained that this was what I was going to have to do, whether I liked it or not. I had a lot of “talent” that apparently was some sort of crime to man to waste. And so I persevered until the day when I was a collegiate runner and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I told my college coaches I was done and ended my elite “career” if one dares to call it so. I didn’t ask anyone what they thought, I just listened to my heart and found the courage to speak up. It was an odd ending to a story so long in the making, and a strange way to say good bye to something that others had told me was to be my identity.

Nonetheless, life went on, as the novella of running finished and I added it to my bookshelf called life. Then a few weeks later my parents separated in what would inevitably end in divorce a few years later. Although this divorce happened for warranted reasons that were valid for my parents, it felt like the novella of my life titled “My Family and My Home” was done. I took that book and added it to my shelf called life too. I was losing sense of who I even was anymore. It was hard – my identity for my whole life was rooted in being told I was such a good athlete and in being part of a respectable, wholesome family. I started to see the world for what it really was – fractured. I felt a loss of self that I still feel to this day. Maybe that’s part of the reason God says our identity is supposed to be found in being his child alone – because he knows things will fall apart and that we need one thing that we can always feel safe in.

Life went on – good things happened and I got married and moved away. But moving was hard. I didn’t think it would be – I mean what did I even have left to call “home”? It felt like I added a novella to my shelf of life called “Hometown”. When I go back and visit now hardly any friends are left, campus looks different, there is no family “home”, my grandpa that I love so much and admire more than most anyone is in a nursing home unable to think or talk really. My sisters are older, one has moved away. My darling family dog has passed away. Campus has changed, the streets look different. When I visit it feels like I am a ghost, quietly saying that “I used to live here, I was somebody!” but no one can see me, no one can hear me.

Life has become cleft and often difficult, yet still good. I often don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t know where I belong. I have my husband and I know it’s a place that I “fit”. It feels so good to fit somewhere. I have my career and I know I make a difference with my students. I always remind them that they will always “fit” in my heart. I keep going, I make new friends and reminisce about old ones. I have my mom, and I know I will always fit right into her arms no matter how big I grow.

But what I am learning is this –we all feel like we don’t fit at times. That things just fall apart and we often don’t know why. People move away, people die, people let you down. But people also pick you back up again, love you, open their homes to you for a meal, and accept you just as you are. Maybe part of the reason God said we are to be the “body of Christ” is because he knows we all need a place to fit together and to feel whole again.

So what do I do with all these books on my shelf of life? Where do I go from here? How do all of the experiences fit together? How do I stop feeling like a letdown in everything I do? The short answer is this - I don’t know. Life still feels fractured – but here’s the thing about fractures in the body – with the right nutrients and rest they are able to heal. Perhaps this is a time to rest my weary soul in the lover of it, to feed it with nutrients of community, friendship and the subtle beauty of verity.

Perhaps our fractures create little crevices in our lives where others can now “fit” who we never made space for before. Perhaps they slow us down so we can take time to reflect on truth and love and beauty. So as I reflect back on the things that were so good that make me so sad now, I am finding the strength to remind myself, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” (Dr. Seuss) Maybe my family looks a whole lot different now, and things are really wrecked, but you know what, now I can relate a whole lot better to those around me who feel broken, depressed and overcome. In a sense, I am now more human than I have ever been before.

"Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think." -Winnie the Pooh