Everyone hates moving. I am no different, but somewhere in the pain and stress of moving we are able to peel back the layers of our lives and rediscover who we are. People carry their lives with them in brown cardboard boxes, and when we open them up we remember what what we're about.
Today my best friend left Charleston because she got her big break--a real job--a job we went to school to do. At the same time, I find myself moving apartments post grad school. If you've read my blogs or ever talked to me before you will know that grad school is no easy task and that for me to proclaim a desire to continue my education in English, might be absurd. But today, I crawled way back into the under-stair closet that for the past year has hidden away the "less important" items of my school days.
I struggled as I pulled out heavy boxes full of books, notebooks, and spiral bound journals. My first thought was that the books had to go--there are plenty of good homes I can think of that the books could find happiness in. I yanked back the tape, pulling up some of the brown box with it and I began picking up books. Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte De Aurthur, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Tolkien criticism, Norton Shakespeare, the list goes on. I picked up each book and smiled as I remembered the knowledge, both historical, and literary that each one contained. I placed all the books back into the box and realized that I can never really give up learning. It's too much of who I am. I crave the pain of trying to figure out a 20 page paper, but also the joy that comes when you know you did a good job and that you connected with the past. I can't give these books up--they need a real home--a bookshelf in a professor's office. These beautiful books can't be pushed aside.
Of course I am happy in my new job--you can't live life worrying and hating the moment you're in. Our time is just a vapor as each present becomes the past and every future becomes the present. As I cried watching my friend leave today, I remembered each happy moment we had together and was happy to say that I rarely have bad memories--I make good ones. I want to live life like Thoreau and not realize that "when I come to die, discover that I had not lived. I [want to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swatch and shave close, to drive life int a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms." How amazing to suck the marrow of life out of each day--to contribute to the world we have been placed in? As I move, I have to ask myself if I am living deep enough--if I am sucking all the marrow out of life. Or, maybe I am settling into the comfortable routine monotony of life? I don't want my cardboard boxes stuffed into the back of some closet--I want the contents of those boxes poured out everywhere and placed into my everyday life so that I can live the life I was called to live. I want to feed on the marrow of life daily as I create the futures into presents that quickly become the memories of our past.
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