A man takes a rocketship into the sky
He lives on starlets dying in the night
And follows in the trail
The scatter of light
The larger sensations coalesce in my memory into overall impressions more easily than they can be drawn out individually for description. Some days I’m glad to have a quiet office over lunch so I can put pen to paper (virtually) and record them in order to remember and relate them in due time. It’s Friday, though, and even George Winston in the earmuff headphones can’t block out the sound of the computer next door blaring movie trailers over unmuffled conversation. I don’t even know what I want to write. My mind moves from moment to moment, recalling poignant times in college and before, but never long enough to gather more than the most fleeting scent of memory. Isn’t it amazing that we can remember fractions of a second from years ago? Some of the things that come to mind are turning around in the empty brickyard on a cold January afternoon, wearing the gray striped sweater, the lull of energy in the high tide of the day as I struggled to stay awake in a math class. I remember feeling so unshielded then. University was a transitional time, and as glad as I was for certain aspects of that knowledge–a goal to work toward, for one–the close-ended nature of that time always impinged on my thinking. I can only get caught up in details for so long; I invariably return to a wider picture of things, even now.
We used to comment that college wasn’t “the real world,” but rather than said in a self-deprecating way, or jokingly condescending toward our younger classmates once we had graduated, it was a comforting statement. There was a transparency to that knowledge, though, that made our position feel tenuous. In retrospect, it’s counterintuitive how the relative singularity of purpose in college made me feel so unsteady at times, and how the creeping avalanche of responsibilities to follow in subsequent years actually fosters a greater sense of security. Is it more self-knowledge? The pursuit of that knowledge is, according to conventional wisdom, the grand goal one’s late teens and twenties, but if a similar level of responsibility to what we are experiencing now used to be assumed at a much younger age, and human nature hasn’t changed (which it hasn’t), what’s different? There are a myriad of answers, of course, and it’s up to me, by His grace, to make the best of the modern sequence of things. The more important corollary to the fact that human nature hasn’t changed is the knowledge that God’s nature hasn’t changed. That’s a knowledge to build life around.
As I read your post, I thought about an evening in Juneau last week when we watched the stars with Paul. He took us, after a wonderful meal with some of his friends, to the end of Douglas Island, about five miles from his apartment. He stopped at the tip of the island near a boat launch. In the cold darkness we could see a green light from a dock across the water, and looking up a million – an uncountable number – of stars. The Milky Way was straight overhead as whitish streak. Paul hoped to show us the aurora hovering over the northern mountain ranges across the water. As we waited in the cold we saw meteors streak across the north sky near the big dipper. Fog on the water periodically blocked our view of the sky – and then cleared again. As we scanned the sky for the aurora’s colors we saw a faint pinkish cast on clouds to the east. Then after a while we began to see an odd bright light appear at the top of the mountain range to the east. It began as a bright point of light which became brighter and brighter but without shape, like a headlight in the dark. We thought this was too bright for the aurora or a plane flying over the northern sky. Finally we realized it was not the aurora but the cresent moon rising up over the nountain. I think we all felt we’d seen something very beautiful and unique. This was just one event in many from our trip to Juneau, when I felt so blessed to see the grandeur of our world – snow capped mountains, waterfalls, whales spounting in the channel, groups of eagles perching in trees and on logs in the river, bears eating salmon in the streams – and I understand why Paul is there. I hope that I can remember this beauty and live in more the wonder than the “dailyness” of life.