This Is Goodbye My Friends

I have this white board in my old bedroom in my parent’s house that is still filled with a list of things to bring to college, which I hastily scribbled out five months ago. When I returned home sick, the list couldn’t help but draw my eye, with it’s bright blue scrawl now acting as the centerpiece in my empty room.

Rock Climbing Gear

Yoga Stuff

Bedding…

It is amazing that this messy little list is the best reminder of what I thought my first semester in college would be like. I was finally escaping god-forsaken Oklahoma to live at the base of the Rockies, in a town where yoga studios littered every corner and I could eat granola and yogurt every day. In the end, I did a pretty good job guessing what I would need for life in my teeny-tiny dorm. But I could never have predicted how my first semester would turn out. Though I put my climbing gear at the top of the list, I only made the time to go climbing once, and my yoga practice took a long vacation when my illness moved in. I did make ample use of my bedding (you become good friends with your sheets when you are bedridden for two months), and ate my weight in granola and yogurt.

Now I am moving back home to recover from my illness with my family’s support, and I have been reflecting on my first semester of college. I imagined that I would climb out of bed in the morning, dash off to yoga for an hour or two, maybe go to a few classes, then be off to the Flat Irons for an evening climb. Clearly, life had different plans.

I wish that I could offer up an insight from my experience, summarize in five hundred words or less the greater truth I have learned. But, I can’t. Like my situation right now, my emotions and insights are complicated. I enjoyed my time at CU; I will miss the school and my friends. But I know logically that returning to the University of Oklahoma is the best thing for me right now. I have no clear idea what I want to do with my life, or even what continent I will be on in six months. I do not even know where I will be living in January.

All I can really do is try to avoid poking my tender and confused emotions too much, and let them sort themselves out. I can bake Christmas cookies, enroll in classes, and try to find some way to build a new life in Oklahoma. Looking back, it was the times when I was goofing off with my friends, or doing what I loved that I was happiest. So, maybe it doesn’t matter what state I am in (and maybe Oklahoma is not as god-forsaken as I once thought), but what I do with the time that is given me.

For now, the only insight I can offer you in my last post is this; life never fits in a plan. There is rarely a clear answer, and it is nearly impossible to pick a course and stick with it till the end. But despite my terribly confused life and my equally confused emotions, the monkey wrenches I have been thrown have made my life richer than I could have imagined when I first wrote my list on that abandoned white board.