365 DAYS

As I sit here in nothing but the glow of the Christmas tree lights and the computer screen, staring at the ornaments that have been collected to be brought out and admired for only a handful of weeks out of the year and then tucked away, safe in their packings until Christmas rolls around again, when another few ornaments will be added to the collection and the process repeats itself, I wonder what milestones will have come and gone when I next look at them.  When I looked at them last, I was not quite the person that I am sitting here tonight and I marvel at how much can change in just 365 days; how many ways a person can evolve day by day as events unfold that no one can know until the moment they happen, or even, perhaps, until they've already passed, the change as yet unperceived, but there nonetheless.

I used to be terrified of death, and of dying.  I have never felt that feeling of invincibility others talk of feeling in their youths - I spent far too many hours and days surrounded by sickness and death as a child to ever feel as though I had the power to laugh in death's face.  I saw him early, and he terrified me.  It is only as an adult that I have managed to conquer that terror, consigning death to an immutable and unavoidable truth that may never bring me peace, but is not something that haunts my nights with its presence.  What terrifies me now, as I look at each ornament, some marking my birth, some made by a Carrie long-changed by days and years of accumulated events, some made by the kids I could never quite imagine but desperately wanted, is uncertainty.  Uncertainty destabilizes me; knocks me from my center into a freefall of unknown variables and onto a path around which I stumble, not knowing what I might find around any corner.  Not that any of us ever know, really, but if I can at least have a vision of what I hope to find at the end of the path, I can walk it; can handle the odd twists and turns when I know that there are a few constants upon which I can ground myself.  It is when you have no constants that the algebra problem becomes unsolvable, no matter how many ways you rearrange the equation.  And this terrifies me.

I feel my constants slipping into a place of mutability, where change becomes possible, and the goals are no longer clearly seen on the path ahead.  I am forced into a state of becoming, once again, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that, or the 365 days that will mark the time that passes when I once again sit in front of these lights, looking at these ornaments, wondering where I might find myself another 365 days gone by.

Just Breathe

My sister asked me, upon finding out that I managed not to fail out this semester, if it meant that I could breathe now.  And I don't think that there is a more apt question that could have been asked.  It seems that I have been in a state of breathlessness since the semester began and when I look back on it, it is a miracle that I managed to do as well as I did (even with the medication...).

Somehow, between the end of last semester and the end of this semester I managed to get married, sit at my mom's bedside in her final days, start class days after her death, deal with K jumping from a moving car to escape going to school, find and close on a house, move, put a house together, handle E's severely damaged knee and subsequent wheelchair, try to deal with the holidays and actually pass the semester.  Not extremely well, but not horribly, either. I DID manage to kill my 4.0, but hey, everyone is entitled to one bum semester, aren't they?

In the last weeks of the semester, I found something curious happening to me.  I had this overwhelming urge to create.  Something.  Anything.  (Please do not mistake this for PROcreate... I've had my fair share of THAT, thanks.  There will be no making of live things in THIS household.)  I think that my brain has been so immersed in left-sided thinking that the right side of my brain has been feeling a bit neglected.  I have this overwhelming desire to learn how to paint with watercolors (oils were always my thing... always did want to learn how to do watercolors successfully), set up my jewelry bench, seriously get creative with my new camera, write, anything that feeds my poor, depleted right side.  But oddly, the things that inspire most of those activities (with the exception of the jewelry), are the things feeding my left brain - the beauty of the cells and neurons that fill my head.  Is that slightly weird?  Of course, we all know that I'm slightly weird anyway.

So now I'm sitting here, trying to ignore the cool neuroscience book that I got for my class next semester to do some light reading as I head off down to Florida over the holidays, and trying to sort out what I need to do first: the mountains of laundry that managed to pile up over dead week and finals week, clean, grocery shop, christmas shop, or bathe.  After the blogging, of course.  And the deep breath.  Strangely enough, that is the thing that comes the hardest.  Remembering how to do that.