Howdy.

How’s the weekend?

Here are some August musings concerning time, the thing I am constantly learning, and what I miss the most when I’m traveling.

AUGUST UNDER MY FEET

August feels strange under my feet. How it got there, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve been floating through it’s long, sun-drenched days in clouds of thought. It’s the eighth month of the year, the month in which I will start my last semester of college. The month that bridges July to September, which, is never not startling and abrupt. August always feels like a vacuum in that way. It’s this space you step inside of and float aimlessly through until you can stand up straight again and recall your name. The disorientation of summer and how I loathe it, yet how I need it to appreciate work and school and all of the other things we convince ourselves that we don’t want to do.

I’m baking oatmeal raisin cookies and slicing watermelon and braiding my hair under the sun. I’m reading bits and pieces of all of my favorite books like bites of candy, each paragraph a little gem to roll around in my mouth for a minute. I’m trying, more than anything, to not go insane. I’m researching jobs, preparing resumes. I remember a few years ago I was sitting in a class during fall semester, watching the girl next to me type up her resume in the middle of lecture. She was graduating. She seemed very old and very far ahead of me for that at the time. I remember feeling excited for her. Now, I am her. I only blinked my eye.

WITH OPEN HANDS

On another note, I’ve been really blown away lately at the utter kindness and compassion that I have observed in people. When we’re young kids, I think that we assume people are good. There is a window where we have yet to be truly hurt and we use it to look out of and see the world as a kind place. Then we start school and we learn that kids can be mean, terrible little monsters and we lack the education to understand why they are acting that way so it all feels personal and awful. By the time that we are teenagers we are already so full of angst and distrust that we can barely breathe. The world becomes anything but a safe, loving place. But then, and I’m still wading my way through this, it gets better. People grow up. They hate themselves less, allowing them to be kinder to others. Our brains develop more. We think about things other than ourselves. And suddenly, the world begins to feel like a place that is not so terrible all of the time. It starts to feel beautiful.

I had this teacher in high school who used to tell us that she had spent her whole life walking around with clenched fists, ready to fight. She built a cement wall around her heart and she guarded it like a secret. She begged all of us to unclench our fists, to choose to walk through this world with our hands open and our hearts on our sleeves, that that is the only way we will ever find light and joy and all of the other things that cement keeps out just as well as it keeps out hurt and betrayal. I’ve never forgotten that. The open hands, the bare palms, the beauty in vulnerability. It means more to me now, as an adult, than it ever could have then. For I wasn’t yet ready then to let down my walls and believe in the good of people. I thought that that was naive and weak. But I’m learning now that it’s actually the opposite, that choosing to believe in the good is what takes strength. It felt awkward and clumsy and hippie-dippie at first. But people are proving to me all of the time why it’s the right thing to do. Strangers, friends, neighbors, the people that I make coffee for on the weekends, they are, more often than not, beautiful people that give me hope for humanity. Don’t get me wrong, there are always those miserable souls who hate themselves and can’t help but try to spread that pain on others in a desperate attempt to alleviate it, but they are few. And the kind, caring ones are many. I’m learning that all the time.

I MISSED THIS

Going back to work after a vacation always sounds like a dreadful idea, but I find that once I’m actually there, I remember how much I need it. New York was brilliant, but it was also lonely in the sense that I did not have anywhere that I needed to be. When I went into coffee shops, I would watch the baristas interact with each other and with the customers and find myself missing those little moments. I saw people going to summer school with their backpacks and college sweatshirts and I missed that too. I was floating through space and free-falling through time. And I didn’t understand the fullness of that until I was back at work today, feeling like a part of something again. I missed my coworkers and the regulars and the dorky book nerds who come in, never prepared for my uncontrollable interest in what paperback they are clutching. I missed the warm boxes of fresh pastries that get delivered on Saturday mornings and how plating them in the display case always makes me feel like the protagonist of a Hallmark Christmas movie. (If you know, you know.) There’s confidence and comfort in the routine of these things that I always forget about until I find myself on the outside of it, looking in. I may have been covered in miscellaneous food and coffee stains, telling one person the wifi password while another where the bathroom key is, but I was on the inside of it all. I missed that.

Happy Sunday. ❤

Love, m.

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