I went for a bike ride today after a 6 o'clock breakfast meeting. It was 7:30 when I got back to my apartment and I really just wanted to go back to bed, but I knew that if I didn't immediately change clothes and head out, I'd never get around to it and end up wasting the day. I told myself I'd only ride for thirty or forty-five minutes, just to get back in the habit of making it a regular part of my days off.
I ended up biking almost 16 miles.
It took an hour and a half, and I'm still not entirely sure why I did it. I had a lot on my mind, I guess, and something about punishing myself until my legs felt like jelly was soothing and/or distracting.
I rode all the way from my apartment to Cliff Fritschle's house and back again, ironically the same Cliff Fritschle with whom I had just finished eating breakfast. We talked about the changes that have taken place in my life over the last year or so since I first met with him and the need for me to continue growing in different directions that don't revolve around meeting with him weekly. We talked about the ideas of accountability and mentoring and how, although he has been both of those things for me in direct relation to my struggles with alcohol, I'm not where I was a year ago and don't have the same needs I did then. I need to pursue accountability in terms of more than just whether or not I wanted to drink this week, and on a more peer-oriented level with people who are in a similar/same phase of life as me. I need mentoring in some areas of my life different from those to which he can speak directly with wisdom and experience and authority. And that's okay.
I mean, it should be... right?
Cliff will be the first to admit that he isn't Jesus, and I know I shouldn't try to treat him as such, but old habits die hard, I guess. I really just want to be able to meet with him on Tuesday mornings and have that be enough. I don't want to have to change; to engage these different issues; to seek out new people who will speak new truth to me in new ways and behave/respond to me such that I can't predict what they'll say if I tell them what a wreck my life is and how tired I am of constantly putting everything in my life under the microscope.
I want things in my life to just work: I want to stop having to crawl out of the ditch and sit across the table from someone with my eyes downcast to tell them about the newest and latest convoluted train wreck I've managed to make of my life. I want to come home and have a clean apartment and not worry about how long I can wait to pay the student loan people before they start hassling me with phone calls. I want to be able to go to work with a sense of purpose and pride in what I do and feel like I'm making a difference in the world. I want to have friendships with people who are easy to love and validate everything about my existence and endorse/justify everything I say and do. And with obvious exception of the last one, I feel like those are good and healthy wants to have.
To be honest, though, I think the last one is probably the lynch-pin to the problem: I want the people around me to enable me to have all those other things and be the ones who are ultimately responsible for whether or not I'm achieving my goals or feeling alright or having a good day. I treat life like it's a movie and get really wrapped up in whether or not the main character (me) is going to be happy by the end of it. I expect everyone I meet to get second- or third-bill credit and not step on my lines, yet meaningfully contribute to moving the plot forward. I want to have all the cool dialog and wind up with the girl of my dreams and construct some elaborate scheme so that the bad guy to gets what's coming to him. I want my character defects to be endearing to the audience and have everybody rooting for me to win.
In short, I want to be the most selfish and self-centered prick you've ever met in your life.
I really don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to live within your means and have a clean apartment and a fulfilling career and loving friends. The problem comes from expecting those wants, in and of themselves, to be the driving force that makes a difference in your life. Actually, that's incorrect. *A* problem comes from that, but not *the* problem.
Each of those things comes with a cost. It takes diligence and self-control to make a budget and hold yourself to it. It takes making time and skipping out on fun afternoons to be responsible and take care of housework. You have to work hard and function in circumstances that aren't ideal and hunt for opportunities to move into work that you love and care about. You have to be honest with people and be willing to be let down by them and not expect them to be perfect and admit your own shortcomings and let them be disappointed or angry or hurt or whatever you think they're going to be, but, ultimately, recognize and affirm the value that they have and trust that they love you enough to not think as poorly of you as you do.
THE problem is that I don't wanna do any of that.
On the way back from Cliff Fritschle's house today, I stopped on a Parmer Lane bridge to look at some turtles in a river/pond thing. I'm still not entirely sure what it was. All I know is that on the way to Cliff's house, I really wanted to stop and look over the edge to the water below and see if I could see any fish swimming around, but I felt like that would be a stupid and childish thing to do and, besides... I was kinda on an adrenaline high from the bike ride by that point. On the way back, I was feeling pretty good about having made it all the way there and as I came back across the opposite side of the bridge, I could see a bunch of turtles swimming around. There was one that looked about as big as a trashcan lid just floating around and I decided to reward myself for a ride well-done (at least, well-almost-done) by stopping to watch the turtles for a minute. I took my sunglasses off because a. I couldn't see the turtles as well with them on and b. I have an irrational fear of dropping things from incredible heights. I don't know if a fifty-foot bridge counts as an incredible height, but it's the tallest thing I've been on in a while, so I took them off. Regardless, the fear is rooted in a habit I have for dropping things and having sunglasses fall off my face and into a river sounds exactly like something that would happen to me, so it just seemed prudent to take them off and set them delicately on the concrete wall keeping me safely contained on top of the bridge. Just as the trashcan lid swam away, I turned to see/feel the gust of a large 18-wheeler that happened to be driving by and, in a moment I can only describe like something out of a movie, I watched my sunglasses rattle for a split second before being flung over the edge of the wall, tumbling end over end through the air, into the water below.
Not gonna lie, I was fairly pissed off about the whole thing, but it was one of those situations in life that's so irreversible and funny that you have to laugh about it because there's really nothing else to do. They weren't even good sunglasses (although they were my only pair) and I had only bought them to go to the river with some friends, and I had gotten the cheapest pair I could find just in case they didn't make it back. That they had lasted me three months was more than I had originally expected from them and, besides, it seemed like a lot of hassle to try and get down into this nasty pond water and swim around to fish them out. I peddled on home, replaying the scene over and over in my head, laughing most of the way back.
I've kept thinking about that whole incident, though. How, if I hadn't stopped to watch the turtles, I would still have my sunglasses. How, if I hadn't been so restless and disquiet in my thoughts, I probably wouldn't have gone so far. How, if I'd just stayed in and gone back to bed, I would never have even known those stupid turtles were down there, anyway. I kept trying to think of some way to relate this incident to the rest of my life; to make some kind of grand analogy out of it, where the pond is my brain and the turtles are my restless thoughts and the sunglasses are... well, they're my sunglasses. I wanted there to be some reason for why this thing happened and why I have to go buy new sunglasses now. Like, I wanted to find out that these sunglasses were some kind of defective model that shatter into a million pieces when you expose them to oxygen and they're made with lead-based paint and emit toxic radiation or something.
But I think, after an entire day of dwelling on it, I can honestly say that there's no great analogy to be drawn here. I think it's just the way life goes. If you're going to be active and stop to look at turtles, you're going to lose your $8 sunglasses sometimes. And if they're such a big deal to you, yeah... you probably should just stay home. There's risk inherent to living that, in trying to insulate yourself and stay safe, you lose the things that make you really alive. At a certain point, you either have to see value in things that aren't just "stuff" and operate as though the universe doesn't revolve around you or just get used to being the same old, miserable sad-sack you've always been and quit complaining about how hard everything is.
I think this is why the Bible resonates so much with me. Jesus said, "Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it." I've seen so many instances in my life where the harder I try to hold on to the things I think are valuable, the more trucks keep speeding past to blow them away and the more I realize how worthless the stupid things were in the first place. (Is it bad that I'm still looking for that analogy?) Rhetorically, I want to believe that the stuff I have and the opinions held of me don't really matter, but it's another thing entirely to actually release it all and trust that God's not just going to hang me out to dry and leave me looking like an idiot. I'm so afraid of what might happen if someone were mad at me or people stopped liking me or if I lost all the cool stuff I have that makes life so easy and comfortable. But I know I'm not happy with it either. Why can't I just let go?
All said, it's been a good day. It hasn't really felt like it and I'm still in kind of a funk, but that's the way it goes sometimes. I got my oil changed and folded some laundry and went to the grocery store today, so it's not like I did nothing. Yeah, I still need to work on my budget and be more intentional about making time for specific people, but in the end, I got some important things checked off my list for this week and I can live with that. I am not the mess I used to be and God has proven himself more than capable and faithful enough to carry me along this stage of life, too.
Goodnight, all. See you out on the road tomorrow...
P.S. if you happen to be swimming around the Avery Ranch/Brushy Creek area and find a pair of sunglasses, be a pal, eh? It's my only pair...
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