Worry Sources

Today's Ten Thousand Questions question:

Which do you worry about most: money issues, relationship conflicts, or potentially embarrassing social situations?

For me, it's relationship conflicts, no contest. I can shrug off social embarrassments as ultimately meaningless, and I feel confident that I can solve the money questions that arise in my life through information, intelligence and effort. But relationship conflicts--no matter how much effort I put in, there is no guarantee of anything working out.

2012 Gratitude

Highlights of 2012 (5): What are you most grateful for this year?

I'll put down the top five things in my life/year that I'm most grateful for, in order of importance:

1. Improved communication and communion with O., particularly for the breakthrough conversations we had in mid-October than changed so much.
2. New friends and old--who would be higher on this list if it weren't for the fact that I am equally grateful for them every year. 
3. Our house, which is so much better than our 2011 dwelling and which is now occupied by only us and the bunnies.
4. Bunnies, babysitting, the other part-time job, and grad school applications: things that keep me occupied and give me a sense of purpose or accomplishment.
5. Health.

2012 Learning

Highlights of 2012 (4): What was the most important thing you learned this year?

Probably the Speaker-Listener Technique, our marriage counselor's first lesson for us. This communication protocol is priceless for any kind of sticky conversation, provided both parties agree to it. It's essentially an algorithm for clear communication, and it goes like this:

1. Select an object, let's say a waterbottle, to represent "the floor."
2. Choose one person to be the Speaker. The other party will be the Listener.
3. The Speaker takes the waterbottle. He or she now has the floor (the right to speak).
4. The Speaker says a sentence or two about the topic at hand. (Some types of statements are not allowed, for instance name-calling.) Ideally he or she uses "I"-statements but this isn't required.
5. The Listener may ask a clarifying question if he or she is confused. Then the Listener reflects or summarizes what he or she understood from the Speaker's statements: "I hear you saying that..." "What I heard you say was..."
6. If the Listener has understood correctly, the Speaker confirms this and the process returns to step 4. If the Listener's statement was not an accurate paraphrase, the Speaker restates him or herself and the process returns to step 5.
7. When the Speaker has said as much as he or she wants to say at that point, he or she gives the water bottle to the Listener. Now the Listener has "the floor" and becomes the Speaker; the previous Speaker is now the Listener.
8. Repeat steps 4 through 7 as necessary.
9. Exit the conversation, having avoided a lot of misunderstanding.

2012 Person

Highlights of 2012 (3): Who is your Person of the Year — the person who had the biggest impact on your life, or who provided the most inspiring example for you?

It's O.!

Is it cliche to cite my husband as the most influential person in my life? If it is, I don't care. We are still so early in our marriage that his presence every day is a novelty, and he startles me regularly. I hope it is always like this. 2012 was definitely a better year for our relationship than 2011; I look forward to seeing what 2013 brings us.

2012 Decision

Highlights of 2012 (2): What was your biggest question or biggest decision this year?

Will O. quit his job? When? What will happen next?

Those were the early November questions. O. did quit and is now unemployed. We are living off savings and my meager income, which will carry us for quite a while. Hopefully I get into grad school and get a stipend starting in September! For now, O. is doing lots of housework and plotting to earn money through private tutoring in computer science, and hanging out with me, and generally being so much happier than when he was working that I can only conclude that the decision was worth it.

2012 Challenges

It's Ten Thousand Questions Day! This week at Ten Thousand Questions, the theme was Highlights of 2012; I intend to answer the five questions today (in five posts, since I am still aiming for 100 posts this year...).

Beginning with Monday's question: What was your biggest challenge this year?

Well. 2012 had quite a few challenges. From December 2011 into January 2012, I spent my first Christmas and New Year's away from my family, staying for a week (or more?) with O.'s family in Florida. We also had to find a subletter and move in the first half of January. February brought the mundane adventures of learning my way around the grocery and hardware stores in the new town.

March and April were filled with failed attempts to hang curtains, as well as the acquisition of two adorable rabbits who presented ridiculous furry problems. In May I forced myself to drive in New Jersey for the first time (during a torrential downpour, as it happened; I arrived 30 minutes late to the vet appointment).

In June (or late May?) I spent a week away from O. at Basileia. That joyful week, though, confronted me with the fact that I felt more confident facing new people and a new situation without O. than with him, and that it was easier for me to keep my relationship with God in good order when I was away, on my own. A new friend advised me, sternly, not to think about going back, but to think about moving forward. Her words echoed in my mind when I got home to O. and confessed my discoveries to him.

Somewhere in there O. fasted for seven days--a miserable and worried week for me. Plenty of marital challenges this year, definitely.

July's trip to Turkey was accompanied by the joys and frustrations of spending many hours of the day in close quarters with relatives on both sides.

August was the beginning of a new job with our church, which has challenged my communication skills and my ability to assert my preferences. That's actually been the major struggle recently, although the conflict of a few weeks ago seems to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. I just hope our negotiated plans work out.

September began a babysitting job, which is mostly fun. Disciplining a three year old and changing his diapers definitely challenges me, though.

Oh, September. Suddenly it all comes flooding back: L. and J. and their two cats moving in with us due to a housing crisis for them; our failure to establish expectations at the beginning of their stay, which stretched for two months; our refrigerator unwontedly crowded with bottles of salad dressing and mustard and a dozen other things; three jars of peanut butter in the overflowing pantry; limited bathroom access; cat allergies; the rabbits stressed out; practically no alone time with O. And meanwhile, O. gradually deciding to quit his job, hopefully leave the tech field altogether, and strike off in a bold new direction (though just what direction was unclear). Thank God we were already in counseling at that point!

October was more of the same.

November started with a hurricane, during which O. gave his two weeks' notice, with my ambivalent consent. During a non-trivial portion of that week, the atmosphere inside the house matched the winds and storms outside. L. and J. found a new place to live at last and moved out just after the storm. Then Thanksgiving, then December, and Christmas, and here I am at the end of the year.

Conclusion: 2012's biggest challenge, by far, was sharing the house with a stressed-out couple, two highly allergenic cats, and occasionally a very energetic five year old girl--for two months. Would I do it again? Maybe. But I would plan it a heck of a lot better and not be shy about asking for changes, because, by gosh, it's my house. And I would not harbor the cats for more than a week.

Songs

Friday's question at Ten Thousand Questions:

In your memories, what song is inextricably tied to a particular group of people or an activity that you participated in years ago?

This song by Death Cab for Cutie:

--and this song (and every other by Postal Service), reminding me of a boy years ago who was so proud of his musical tastes, telling me he liked Postal Service and indie bands and hated pop, telling me he felt so vindicated when he visited a friend at Berklee and found the music students all liked the same music he did:

He quoted from the first song to me--

Sorrow drips into your heart
from a pinhole
just like a faucet that leaks
and there is comfort in the sound

--and I said I didn't understand. How could sorrow be comforting? It can get addictive, he said. I was eighteen, and innocent. That was February. At the end of May, with regret and shame leaking through pinholes into me, I understood.

That summer, interning in children's ministries at my church at home, I cried on the stairs before work, after the worship services before putting on a costume to lead Sunday school, at home on my bed when my sister wasn't in the room. In the fall, back at school where I might run into him, I stared around me into the shifting crowds, hoping for and dreading a glimpse of him. Every navy-blue jacket, every tall slumped dark-haired figure--I would stare, blink, run away.

Listening to those songs, I am right back there sitting in the cafeteria with him as he mocks me over pizza and makes innuendos that I am unwilling to understand. I am back under the low ceiling in the other room of the cafeteria as he tells me he never talks about his relationship with his mother, how she's an actress and so dramatic. I am back in my darkened dorm room reading his instant messages on a glowing screen.

I wonder if he is still as sad and mistrustful as he was in those days. It is four and a half years later and the songs he listened to still fill me with melancholy. When I hear Postal Service I pray for change in his life. I hope it has come.

As for me, I am happy and grateful where I am now, as I was then before I met him, and I never seek out Postal Service.

Theme

From Ten Thousand Questions:

If you had to pick one of the following words to serve as the central theme of the next chapter of your life, which would you pick: tranquility, prosperity, triumph, or healing?

Healing. I didn't recognize my sickness, my scratches and scars, until this season started. When did it begin? At the altar when we vowed forever and evers? That winter evening when I made a promise? A year ago, when I was crying every weekend and it seemed for a time that there was no way out?

How far from that I feel. We are in a different place now: married. Time together is still a limited resource (that, if nothing else, I learned at breakfast today), but we aren't suffocating for lack of it. We are thirsty for more but we are not parched, and the rains fall regularly.

Yet it was in that time of stress and distress that I found myself vulnerable: woundable, and in fact wounded. It forced me to see my wounds, so that I could begin see my healing.

I had learned, once upon a time, not to rely on Another. I learned this so long ago that I cannot say what book or teacher told me. Was it stories, was it disappointments? my mother, my father? the very nature of the world? --was it whispered to me by leaves dying from the cold, then by the melting snow? I used to think I could preserve myself by growing in the right shape, with a shell around me like an oyster, or like an insect with its jewel-hued armor. I used to think I could have everything I needed by taking so little from each one that none would run away from me. I used to think you would all run, if I leaned too hard: or if not run, then fall; or if not fall, then attack.

I am trouble. This also I learned, and I locked it up inside and then I lost the key. How can I take it out of myself?

Healing. Already this has been a season of healing. I had to be healed and I had to unlearn and be sliced open by truth till I bled relief and I knew myself anew.

I have oozed other things, along the way. Self-pity, self-hatred. Condemnation, anger, judgment. Confusion. But I am coming clean. This is the season, the season of healing, the season of soothsaying.

 Say to me forsooth, the truth. Pull away the supports that have me leaning all the wrong ways, and settle me on the firm foundation. Unbandage me, and let the sun sterilize my skin. This is the season of straining and growing. Let this be the season of healing.

Comfort Food [Question of the Day]

Today's question: What foods do I turn to for comfort?

It's funny that they should ask that particular question on this particular day when I ate about 8 squares of dark chocolate with roasted almonds, accompanied by several dried apricots. I normally don't eat more than a square or two of chocolate, but I decided to finish the rest of the bar today.

Even after my original desire for chocolate had been sated, I continued to melt square after square in my mouth. When the chocolate succumbed to erosion, the almonds remained like rocks, sitting on my tongue, until they were crushed in the rapid geology of my mouth.

(More pertinent to the original question: tea. That is my go-to for calming myself. Chocolate, though, is the thing I turn to before I realize I need to calm down.)

Anger poem

Since the questions blog is asking about anger right now, here is a poem I wrote on the subject. But it's from Achilles's experience as recounted in the Iliad. This is *not* how anger feels for me. At least, I don't think so.

Like honey dripping so slowly
from the golden comb
onto my waiting tongue
extended, reaching for that sweetness
to fall – I need
just one more drop of
anger: it is so sweet.

The bees arrive
buzzing, and they zoom into my
open mouth, down
my gullet, buzzing endlessly,
and they swarm into my unguarded
ears, shooting into
my brain, where they buzz and
buzz until they recollect
every drop of sweet honey.

My sis thinks the last stanza is too much, too much. The bees go too many places, she says. What do you think?

The lines, from Lattimore's translation, that sparked the above poem:

“that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man's heart
and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.” (18.109)

I hope you believe me that this poem happened because of the Iliad, not because of any event or feeling in my life. It's part of my thesis project.

Dreams [Question of the Day]

From the Questions blog:

Do you sometimes dream about your own death, or about facing life-threatening situations? What deadly perils turn up most often in your dreams? Do these dream perils overlap with your daytime worries, or do your dreams have their own special dangers that don't occur in the dayworld?

YES. All the freaking time. Scary people are constantly chasing me in my dreams, and I don't appreciate it!

Last night's dreams weren't nightmares per se, but there were definitely some nightmarish bits. For instance, I and some other people were being taken into the bowels of an aquarium because some friend who worked needed us to help him out with some unspecified thing. So we were walking through dark corridors, and passing through exhibits, and then we came to the exhibit for a giant spider. Why the aquarium had a giant spider, I have no idea. But there was the huge room for it, filled with a web made of ropes, thick black cables, and it was all dark, and we all just walked in.

The spider never actually made an appearance, but we stood around there for quite a while, and everyone else was totally nonchalant about it, but I shifting nervously, peering around but seeing nothing in the darkness, starting whenever the air moved.

And then we walked out without closing the enclosure behind us, and I encountered a magic lamp thing and a bunch of ink that had to go in it, and an eye-dropper, and a strange guy in a top hat who was associated with the lamp somehow, and it turned out that one of my companions was pretending to be someone she wasn't, and ...

So yes, that's how my dreams go. The perils in them are decidedly dream-dangers, though they never fail to convince me of their terrible reality.

It makes waking up a pleasant surprise, anyway.

Cameras [Question of the Day]

The question at the Ten Thousand Questions blog today asks about your attitude toward being photographed. Funny they should ask that today, because this weekend I was photographed in a rather unusual way.

To clarify: it wasn't an unusual way for a photographer to take a picture; it was an unusual way for me to have my picture taken. You see, my darling sister is taking a photography class, and I was visiting her this weekend.

"Can I take photos of you?" she asked me.
"Sure!" I said.
At which point she added, "--naked?"
"What?"

As it turned out, "naked" meant 'shirtless but covered with a shawl.' So it wasn't the scandal she initially phrased it as. My innocent little sister, talking about naked photos and asking her subject if she was ready to strip...

We were in the studio at 10pm on a Saturday, after watching an artsy and quite lovely show on campus ("Dead Man's Cellphone"). The little college was quiet, and the first door we tried for the arts building was locked. When we did get inside, S. flicked on lights as we walked between walls covered in photographs, paintings, prints. In the studio, she turned on the lamps like giant flowers, unrolled a black backdrop, attached the camera to the tripod. Shirt off, scarf on; door latched, overhead lights off. It was cold, the air on my bare back. The black scarf was softer than I expected, and it draped nicely. I couldn't see too clearly with my glasses off, and perhaps oddly, this half-blindness made me feel more naked than my half-dressedness.

So I clutched the scarf, and peered around, watching my sister fiddle with the camera, and not quite being able to see what she was doing. Click, click, click. "Turn... Can you... Oh, right there." Click. Click. The studio and the set-up were foreign, but my sister with a camera? Entirely familiar. So, shirtless and scarf-wrapped, a camera capturing my naked back, in the winter studio, I was still at home. S. was taking pictures, and I was just the subject. The photographs would not be about me, but about the pictures they portrayed.

Book Rates

I read this Question of the Day late last night and cringed:

How well does your pace of book purchases match up with your pace of reading? Do you read books as soon as you get them home, or do you have a growing stack of books that you're hoping to have time to read someday? If you had to guess, how many unread books are there in your house?

My confession is this: no matter how hard I try to stem* the flow of books into my room, I can't. The tide of words keeps rising. The words flood in through armloads of library books, they rain down from the internet (stormbursts of blog posts, New York Times articles). The words keep flowing in, and I can't drink them all.

To answer the questions more literally: My pace of book-buying matches my reading pace all right now, because I pretty much stopped buying myself books a couple years ago. (This drastic step was only taken after I bought over a dozen books really really cheaply at various school library sales, didn't read most of them, and had to conclude that I have an addiction to buying cheap books...) However, people give me books, and I get books from the library, and then there are all those books available for free online. So my reading pace really does not match my book acquisition pace at all. I probably have at least 10 unread books in my dorm room (although to be fair, some of them are for class!), and then 20 or 30 more in my room back at home.

"Quot libris, quam breve tempore."

At least I can say I've read all 66 books in the Bible! as if that were relevant. I delude myself.

*I got distracted wondering what the origin of that expression is, and the OED informed me that the verb meaning 'To stop, check; to dam up (a stream, or the like)' shares a root with the verb "stammer." Cool!

Longer Books! [Question of the Day]

What's one book that you were sorry to reach the end of; one that you wish had gone on for twice as many pages?

Oh, I could list so many. But here are just a few:

1. The Hounds of the Morrigan
2. Watership Down
3. The Lions of Al-Rassan (Thanks, Tia!)
4. The Neverending Story (If only it would live up to its title! But its point is that life is the best story, so I suppose I shouldn't complain.)
5. A Man in Christ (the only non-fiction I'm seriously listing)
6. I almost want to list Anathem, but that book was definitely long enough (at 928 pages) even though I wanted the story to keep going. 1,856 pages would be far too many.
7. I also kind of want to list Letham's Trinity, because I got so much out of every chapter of that book, but as above, the book was long enough (800+ pages), and it would have been seriously demoralizing to take 8 years to finish a book. Four years is long enough.
8. Tia's novel!!! Only half of it was finished so of course when I got to the end of it, I was quite sorry, and wished for the other half of the pages...
   

Suggestions for fiction I should read are quite welcome!

Energy level: [Question of the Day]

How energetic a person am I?

It all depends on what kind of energy we're talking about... Let's just say it's my subjective sense of energy.

But it still all depends. Who am I hanging out with, and what have we been talking about? (If it was a group, my energy level has probably plummeted--or rather, a foot-tapping and chocolate-eating kind of anti-energy has probably polluted me.) How much did I sleep, and what did I dream? What have I been eating? (If it was all vegetables and fruit, with healthy doses of spice, I should be feeling great.) Is it sunny outside? Does my apartment feel inhabited?

I don't think that my identity/self/soul has an energy level, as though the essence of my being were an electron getting bumped up and down the orbitals as it spins wildly around the nucleus (the kernel of life?). No, neither lethargy nor euphoria are intrinsic to who I am. I think that what is intrinsic to who I am is, rather, the predictable ways that my energy level rises or falls in response to particular situations.

As far as outward manifestations of that energy level, though, I am consistently closer to "calm and quiet" than to the loud, fast-moving energy that I associate with a sugar-high. When people try to say what kind of animal I would be, they never name the twitchy, jumpy animals, like squirrels or frogs or dalmatians or gazelles. Instead, they tell me I am a pony, or (my favorite) a red panda.*

*and then there's the one person who has called me a whale and a stegosaurus... but I'm taking those out of context.

Downtime [Question of the day]

How do I "deal with" downtime?

In my existence, downtime isn't something to cope with or suffer through. It's something to savor. Those layovers in airports, those long transcontinental flights--those gaps between classes--those train rides: I treasure them. The airport and trainstation, these are a between-places, non-places. Time stops there. Waiting, I am entirely uprooted. I am being transplanted. There, as a million people murmur around me, silence reigns inside me. I open a notebook, and just pause.

The pen-tip touches the paper, but it is waiting, too. Like me: this is a waiting time, and I am soaking it in.

Finally I write. The words seem to slide onto the paper, and gently come to a rest there, instead of tumbling over each other in my mind and spilling out haphazardly in their mad rush from the pen. The page has a curious stillness, when I write at the airport. But perhaps not so curious, if the page is a mirror for my mind.

But curiouser still: Why is my mind still when all around me is in motion? The announcements blare every few minutes. Children squirm and run away. Their parents rub their temples, trying to keep their patience. Grim businessmen tap away at their complicated phones.

I feel sorry for them. They are tethered to the world, even here. But I am cut free, drifting away. I am about to float into the sky! Here, I don't have to pay attention to anything. When none of the sounds are relevant, there is no noise. When none of the motion matters, nothing is moving. At the airport, I am above all the paths I am normally running down, all the rooms where I have responsibilities, all the information I am supposed to retain, all the people to listen to.

This is why I am still, why my mind's surface smooths itself like the surface of a pond on a windless day. Glassy, shining, silken. I am still because all the wind and rain is down inside the map that I am looking at. When I step back, step out, I am no longer hiking the hills, panting and sweating and getting dirty. I am looking at the trail map, and I can see how far I've come.

But looking at a map doesn't give me the blazing sun or the roaring rivers. It can't open the sky for me and spread out the landscape like a tablecloth. It can't sing to me like the birds, and the rabbits never dash across it, even at dawn and dusk.

So I don't stay here, in this un-place, this wood between worlds. But while I am here, I will soak in the silent loudness and marinate in the motionless bustle.

What's in your closet? [Question of the Day]

I've got an ice-ax in my closet. Or maybe it's in the garage. Regardless, I have an ice axe. And yes, I've used it.

[from the theme of Things People Don't Know About Me]
http://www.tenthousandquestions.com/2010/03/not-skeleton-but.html

Advice [Question of the Day]

Funny how timely this question is...

A lot of people turn to me for advice. Well, they turn to me as a confidante, and they get sympathy and advice packaged together. Occasionally they also get verbally smacked, because I get upset when I think someone I love is going to do something stupid. So who are these lots of people? My sister; my almost twin (who is coming to visit me! yay!), and sometimes the third in that trio; my other self, the boys across the hall (practically brothers), the boyfriend, the gay boy who was and is my first friend here; my accountability/hiking/breakfast/MPPC buddy; and at least a couple other girl friends here at school.

I suppose I don't really know how many of them turn to me for the purpose of getting advice. But if they listen to my advice and thank me for it, I think that counts.

I give advice on boy / girl situations, on what makes a good relationship (or really, on what things I know make for a bad relationship: process of elimination...); on finding peace, on hearing from God; on what classes to take, on what major to choose, or on how to choose a major; on resolving arguments, on getting along with parents; on reading the Bible, on forming habits, on praying; on cooking; on working in a group; on books to read. I give advice about staying sane, about pausing, about looking for perspective, about stepping back. I give advice on living with pain, on letting go of guilt, on looking for joy.

And really, it's not so much advice as it is sharing my experiences. I try to tell people the reactions that I have experienced and observed so they have some more data without conducting the experiments themselves... Of course, the variables are different for everyone, but some of the conditions are invariably the same. We're all human, after all.

Is giving advice part of my job? Depends what you mean by "job." It's not part of being a student (which I suppose is my job, since it's my task right now; technically I'm even being paid for it). It's not part of being a research assistant, that's for sure, since I haven't a clue what I'm doing. Giving advice isn't in the job description for anything I'm getting paid for or graded on.

But I think the most important "job" I can do right now is being a friend. I want to be the kind of friend that you don't just watch movies with, but the kind you exchange ideas and books with. But more than that, I want to be the kind of friend who knows your life and whose life you know. And more than that: I want to be the kind of friend who knows your joys and struggles and hopes and fears... I want to be the kind of friend who can say "I see you" the way they say it in "Avatar": I see into you. I know you.

And so advice is part of my job--my calling? my place in life? my mission?

But it's certainly not the important part. The part that matters isn't the advice I give so much as the relationships that put me in situations where my advice is wanted and (I hope) useful. It's not the view I see from the mountaintop that matters, because I could see pictures of that view or an IMAX rendition of it and get the same images. What matters is the fact that I'm actually on the mountain, the journey and the destination that put me in a place to be able to see the view. It would be good to be there on the mountain even if I were blind, even if the clouds covered the landscape.

Adventure v. Tranquility [Question from 1/4/10]

As a gateway into everything that's on my mind, Monday's question:

Which would you choose right now: adventure or tranquility? Which would you choose for the long run: adventure or tranquility?

In one sense I'm choosing tranquility right now, because I've consciously chosen a quiet January. For the next 20 days, I have no schedule. These 3 weeks will be fluid, and like any liquid I know they will slip through my fingers, uncontainable, passing by so quickly. They will pass by quietly too, I think. The apartment is nearly silent these days, because I am the only one here, as though I owned my own house. I haven't been locking my bedroom door, since I am the only one who even comes into the common room. No one else is using the bathroom, no one leaving dishes in the sink, no one cranking the heater up to 80 degrees, no one forgetting to lock the door into the apartment.

No one is making noise in the building, either. The first morning I was back, I was surprised to see footprints in the fresh snow by the back door to the building, because the whole place is so silent. The heater whirs and the wind sighs, but no human voices speak in the hallway, and no doors slam closed. The building is sleeping, and the warm air murmuring out of the heaters is its tranquil snoring, its steady breathing.

Yes, I am tranquil now, in this quiet building, with the pale sunlight pouring in the window, and the snow frozen in patterns on the ground outside.

But I haven't been tranquil for all of these recent days, and my apartment hasn't been empty this whole time, and I haven't been silent this whole week. On New Year's Eve, I was in St. Louis, at the Urbana conference, singing and shouting and dancing with 17,000 other Jesus-followers, and my ears were ringing. On the first day of the new year, I was on the clattering Metrolink, and on a roaring Delta plane, and on the whooshing Airtrain out of JFK, and on the rumbling LIRR to come back here. My sister was with me, to sing and chatter and cry and giggle and screech and guffaw. Urbana was an adventure. Traveling in the snow was an adventure. Sisterhood is an adventure.

So I've been choosing those adventures. And even more, I'm choosing the adventure of letting go. Emotions are spirited creatures, which shriek and soar and scatter more often than they curl up and sleep. I'm letting my emotions out to run, instead of trying to keep them in stalls in a static stable. I'm letting someone into my life, into the unswept and badly lit corners, into the rooms visitors never touch. He is asking about the cabinets whose contents I don't show people. I find myself unlocking doors, taking out boxes to show him old pictures, opening notebooks I wrote in as a child.

Opening, opening: I am opening my mind and my heart and my arms, and isn't that the essence of an adventure? When you are all out in the open, there is no telling what might fall in or out, what you might gain or lose. When I let my emotions go galloping through the fields, I don't know when or how they'll come back. But I am trying to learn how to ride them. I will risk the bruises and brokenness, so I can feel the wind sweep across my skin, see the sun paint the mountains. I will risk falling because I want to go places, and isn't that the meaning of adventure, too? Exploring new spaces, from which you might not find your way home.

And I want to choose adventure for the rest of my life, too. Tranquility appeals to me, enchants me. Tranquility entrances me into a sleep of self-absorption. Comfort promises peace. But real peace comes in the midst of storms. Real peace comes not from hiding indoors but from knowing the world God created. Instead of folding in on myself, I want to be unfolded, unfurled. I want to have a greater surface area--the better to absorb the light of life.

I'm afraid of that light, I confess. I want the security of staying still. I want to settle in a quiet neighborhood and live next door to my sister and to my best friends, and raise our children like one big bunch of cousins. I want to shut my eyes to the brokenness of the world and focus on packaging myself in cotton and bubble-wrap so nothing can shatter me. I'm afraid of being hurt, of dying.

But the real reason I don't want to die is that I want to live. Life comes from engagement, not isolation. So I want the adventure that pries me open, that tears away my delusions, that unwraps me. I want the adventure that tosses me into God's capable hands, where I've belonged this whole time.

That's what I heard at Urbana, I believe. God confronted me with the fact that my real objection to going into missions is not that I'm uncertain of His will (though I am) but that I'm too certain of my own will. The problem is that I dream this little dream, colored in pastels, of the perfect suburban life with the neat picket fence, when I could be--should be--am called to be--dreaming God's almighty dream of redemption for the whole world, in painted in bold brushstrokes across a canvas as wide as creation. The problem is that I keep seeking tranquility instead of adventure: the adventure of trust. I'm afraid to trust God.

I'm afraid to trust myself, too. I want an instruction manual for my life, step by step instructions on how to solve these equations, algebra in the spirit of the Gauss-Jordan method. I'm afraid to step out and trust that God wants me to explore, that He wants be to really become myself (since after all He made me who I am). In my effort to rely on Him, I sometimes try to make myself an automaton, but that's not what He wants. "I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full," Jesus said.

And isn't that the essence of adventure?

(De)Compression [Question: How does your personality change when you feel under pressure?]

[Another question from the Ten Thousand Questions blog.]

When I'm under pressure, I tend to shut out everything else and just get things done. I wake up and think immediately of the next task to accomplish. I stop getting enough sleep, I don't hang out with friends. I keep reading the Bible but I don't spend the time to really absorb, to really listen. I don't invest the time and energy it takes to seek the truth, whether via Scripture or simple reflection, prayer and a pen. I compress the tangled expanse of myself into a compact ball, and go bouncing from appointment to assignment to accomplishment. I ricochet off deadlines and collide with my body's needs. With my person crushed into a sphere, life is so much simpler.

Of course, it's not real life, either. With enough pressure, I begin to fall apart. After too many collisions, my compacted personality begins to unravel. I have to untangle myself. I tease out strands and lay them out carefully on the table, following each to its end and easing out all the pieces connected to each. Everything is crinkled and bent. Decompressing, unfolding, I smooth myself out and look for the patterns. . .