Reason Breeds Insanity

Today I am going to go buy some goggles. I am going to start swimming in the mornings. I am not sure if the pool can handle me and my sexy body every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. They may have to beef up the security because people will wnat my autograph. Not only am I an amazing swimmer, but I am so HOT in a bathing suit and all. I figure if I go at 6AM, the only other people there will be geriatrics, so they won’t notice my rotundity anyway. If they do, they may become enflamed with jealousy and start a riot in Ball Pool. That would be cool.

I am going to start swimming again because it gives me an hour of unadulterated thinking time. There is nothing but the quiet of the water, the splash of the wake, and the peace of regulated breathing. My high school boyfriend once asked me how I was so nice all the time. I ask myself that now. How was I? As I look back, swimming was the key. I started every morning with meditation. Sure morning practices were gruelling, and sure the coach was driving and behaved much like a slave master as I waited every morning for him to bring a whip to workouts , but the basic premises of swimming are regulated breathing, concentration on bodily positioning, and silence—moving yoga in the water. I am trying my to find myself again and for so long I was defined by what I did every morning in the water, maybe that is a piece of who I lost. Maybe I would be nicer if I begin three days a week with mobile, water covered yoga. We’ll see.

I made a conscious decision to stop going to church. I love my pastor, but church just irritates me. I won’t go into that tirade again, I will spare you all the angst, but I have decided to spend my Sunday reading. I am consciously trying to read my bible and comment about what I have read every day. On Sundays, my goal is to read what I usually read but to also read a book. Today I read Donald Miller’s Through Painted Deserts, and I was pleasantly surprised by how deeply his writing touched me. I found myself hungering to drop all of my worldly belongings, hop into a VW Microbus, and travel the wild west in search of God. Now I am not so naive as to think that I can’t find God here in Muncie in the loud and siren plagued streets, because I find God here every day. Or [They] find me. When I was half-way through the book, I realized that I needed to go for a walk. Bec and I took our old bread and headed out to feed the ducks. We ended up walking for almost an hour and a half winding our way through Muncie, visiting some new businesses that we had read about in the paper and enjoying each other’s company as well as relishing the time outside in the somewhat urban beauty. We also took the time to reminisce about simpler lives and simpler times. Tonight’s venture was a far cry from last night’s Drag Show Fiasco (who ever heard of a drag show with two contestants?). The pleasure of being out instead of in, of walking instead of sitting, of thinking and talking instead of straining to see what may or may not be going on on the stage of a crowded and smokey bar, reminds me why I seek nature even in the constraints of the city. There is peace to be found walking down the sidewalks of a midwestern town. As we turned onto McCullough to finish the last leg of our journey this evening, after we gave up looking for Joe, I thought I saw a blue tent along the bank of the river. As we got closer to the place where I thought I saw the tent, I was shocked to see that there really was a family camping along the river. At first I thought they may have been a homeless family, but as I got closer I realized that this was a family on vacation. I wondered: who camps along the White River in Muncie? But then I took and minute and listened to the river flowing over the rocks, the crickets chirping, and the ducks preening and quacking, and I didn’t blame them . The calming sound almost drowned out the noise of the passing cars, and the smell of the campfire moved me almost to tears. God was here, even here on the banks of the White River, a block from Muncie Central and a world away from the wilderness. As I type this I am thinking about that family and how they are faring with the trains moving slowly and noisily over the tracks above them. The wheels squeak and grind on the rails, and the brakes grind to slow the hulking beast for its entrance into the city, but I can still smell the smoke from their campfire, and I wonder if they are sleepless like I am.

Rebecca got a job! She starts Tuesday for orientation, and then full time on Thursday! She will be working at Advantage Home Health Care. We are pretty excited! Whoo..hooo…Yippeee!!!! Two incomes!

I am slowly recovering the pieces of me that were lost to corporate insanity, and I am finding that much of me, the me that I was, is still there as the me that I am. I have survived another period in my life in which I was abused by power-hungry imbeciles. I wonder sometimes how my dad survives. He lives that life every day and has for so many years. How does he keep it from eating away at him? How does he cope?

I am recovering, though, from a sort of dark night of the soul that was spent in the throws of busy-ness. I was too busy to contemplate the Scriptures. I was too busy to contemplate ethics. I was too busy to spend time with people, to get to know them, and to get to love them. I was too busy. Business kept me from the things I love. Business, not idleness, is the devis’s workshop. I have HEARD it said that “idle hands are the devils workshop,” but I KNOW that “if the devil can’t make you bad, he’ll make you busy.” The busier you get, the more you neglect and the more you lose.

I am still busy, but it is in a much healthier way. Actually, I am not busy at all. I am in a blissful state of being nurtured through lack of activity but presence of contemplation. Instead of getting up at 4 and driving to work still asleep, I sleep until 9 and make it to class by 10. I actually get a full night’s rest. Nine hours, every night. I have time at night, when I would have been frantically trying to finish homework, to eat dinner with Bec, talk to my friends on the phone, read for pleasure, and even to be silent and listen. I even have time to go to student activities. I actually have time nearly every morning to read the Bible, and to think about it as both a text and as Holy Writ, but I also have time to read everything for class, too.

I made a commitment to take Sunday as a Sabbath, to celebrate Creation and God, and meditate on the amazing and awesome connection between myself and the cosmos. How minuscule am I! How incredibly small! I am but one small particle in the largess of the universe, but I am a child of God. [They] are aware of me?! I have time to meditate. I think about lots of things. My heart breaks for some, and it rejoices for others. My mind follows along.

I think that is the piece of my recovery that makes me happy: my heart leads.

Click here for a story about a friend of a friend who got caught under a lawn mower.
Click here to see a story about a friend of Becky’s.