Life and Poetry...

Yesterday was, well, stressful.  It was a Monday on which I woke up to a very long to-do list, without a really solid plan about how I was going to attack and conquer said list.  I tend to be an anxious person, to let stress get inside me and gnaw at my nerves, and I'm sure that my blood pressure was a little above where it should have been.  The worst part was that I couldn't seem to put my finger directly on the problem.  It's like there was something in the air that was forcing me to live on the verge of an emotional sneeze.  Not a good feeling.

Yet, as I whittled away at my list of things to do, managing to wedge in just a little bit of me-time during the (glorious) afternoon nap, I found myself approaching evening.  We were having company over for supper and my husband arrived home early to help me get ready.  A mere forty minutes beforehand, I finally began to throw together a soup and found out, to my surprise, that I felt...happy.  It was like a warm, fuzzy, almost euphoric quality had made its way into my day and had just been waiting there to be recognized.

I have noticed in the past year or so that those moments happen quite frequently.  As my own, somewhat scientifically-minded, overbearing psychoanalyst, my natural reaction is to go back through everything that was said and done throughout the day to pinprick the exact cause that brought about this feeling of peace.  Often, I can do it, but there are also quite a few days, like yesterday, when I can't.  More importantly, I can sometimes quell the 'why?' and 'what happened?' questions, to simply enjoy the sensation.

It took me back to a beautiful, gray day, toward the end of my fourth semester of college.  I was doing well in my classes and I had recently been accepted to the program that would carry me through the next two years of school.  It had been a season of self-discovery for me.  That was the time when I had learned that I could decide to be happy, and I had been.  As wildly happy as I knew how to be.  And yet...that anxiety hung over me like a cloud.

I had gotten the opportunity to spend the semester studying a variety of things unrelated to my major, among them, the works of Pope, Johnson, Shelly and Keats, and loved every minute of it.  But on that steely-gray day, crossing the campus, I found myself thinking, your life isn't a novel.  It's not a poem.  You've got to grow up.  This is the way life really feels and it's time to get used to that.

I was wrong.  It has taken me all of the years between then and now to begin to see the cadences to which life flows, the lovely words that lie beneath breaths and between sunsets, and the repetitive phrases that make sense of heartbeats and heartbreak.  Life is poetry, though sometimes it's difficult to find and keep the rhythm.  Someday, I might revisit this thought, to explain what made the difference in my perspective and how I discovered what I now know, but for today, this much is sufficient.  

Looking back at that moment of confusion, I'm so grateful that I was wrong.