growing up and the end of summer

This year’s word is hope.

Hope is a defiance against all of the disappointments life sends our way. It’s the ability to believe that there will still be a dawn after the darkest night. The past two years after graduating college felt like entering a fog that was ever getting darker. Even now, there is a winding road, and I’m not sure I have the capacity to hope.

I am someone who likes routines, who likes patterns to my days. But uncertainty has unmoored me. How can you have a grip on a life that shape shifts before your eyes? I used to believe that growing up was where things became settled. You stopped having questions and you had answers. Where you finally became grounded. But instead of finding my compass, I feel lost at sea. 

Recently, I’ve been rewatching Dance Academy, an old show I used to love. The Australian accents, the view of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the drama, even the little lessons sprinkled in with the voiceovers. (The power of audio!) As hard as those dancers are working to chase their dream, it’s made me realize that I don’t have one.

There is no big dream for me. I don’t aspire to a certain job. There are some things I want, but I don’t want them badly enough, at least not right now. I’d love a little bungalow with some nature surrounding it. I’d love to learn French. I’d love to live abroad. I would love to do these things, but I honestly don’t feel enough of a draw to them to pursue them with reckless abandon right now.

How much of life is what we decide? How much just happens?

I just turned 24, but I guess I falsely believed that life would stop surprising me. A text led to a phone call leading to a detour I never expected. A detour a few months ago I said I didn’t want. 

Life doesn’t work out like the movies. There isn’t that ease where things just fall into place. There are unending setbacks that cause you to question if the path you want so desperately to be on is the right one. Life has a will of its own, or rather God does. I still have trouble with control. Thinking that I must make the right decision or it’ll all fall apart. We are powerful, but not that powerful.

When my birthday comes, it’s a sign to me that summer is almost over. That the days will be dark soon, that night will come more quicker, that the biting cold is around the corner. The treacherous twenties are like that. We are faced with the reality of the approaching fall and winter. We can’t stay in the hot sun with the gentle breeze cooling our bodies. No longer can we just sip hot tea and watch the thunderstorms inside our homes.

I am still trying to find my way back to hope. It’s much, much easier to believe that dark days are all that’s ahead. To live in dread and fear and defensiveness. I can’t skip past the growing pains. 

I used to have such a clear vision of what I wanted out of my future, but that vision gets more cloudy the older I get. Nothing can save you from a cloudy vision of the future, not even a walk with God. (So much of following God is unlearning the old ways of being.) The questions underneath the question of where am I going spring up within me? Is it good? Why are the things I wanted not coming to pass? Are closed doors good? Is God good? 

To yield is easy when you know you’re in good hands, but the past with its disappointments and heartaches has made me doubt that. 

I’ll leave you with a quote from the How to Eat an Elephant: War and Peace podcast, “There’s the most hope for a character when there’s the least hope.”

Signing off,

Gigi

A song just popped up on Spotify as I ended this post: Hope by James Spiteri