“And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it? It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out. I want to repeat one word for you: Leave. Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.” – Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I have become a believer that time is not linear. I believe time is actually circular.
I became convinced of that through the help of my professor, Dr. Jill Crainshaw, who said that for her, time was like a spiral. We keep circling around and around, re-visiting the same sites, places, people, and experiences. But as we circle, we also move deeper. Hopefully our understanding as we spiral down becomes deeper and richer. The experience is not static or stale. As we change and grow and expand, we actually keep encountering the same experiences as new people. We have changed and therefore, even if we’ve been there a hundred times before, we are experiencing a radical new encounter.
I’m reminded of that every time I go to the airport. When I was younger, my parents would take vacations on their own twice a year to go diving – always in some exotic far away place that I had never heard of. And when I became old enough to drive, it was my job to pick them up from the airport.
Well, my father has always been a stickler for time. He would call me as soon as the plane landed to make sure I had already left for the airport and would be there waiting for them as soon as they came out of baggage claim.
If you know anything about the arrival gates at airports, you don’t get to just sit and wait in your car on the curb. Traffic has to keep moving. So you normally end up traveling around the airport loop once or maybe twice if you have to wait particularly long. But with my father’s urgency and desire for promptness, I usually arrived well in advance of when they would step out of the exit from baggage claim. That often meant for me, there were three, four, maybe as many as five trips around the airport loop.
There was no room for idling. Around and around I would go, waiting for their arrival.
At the beginning of a new year, I feel as though I’m traveling around the loop, waiting for the arrival.
Even though I’m older, supposedly wiser, and even though many things have changed, I feel as though I’m circling back to some things that still feel so eerily the same.
When I was 15, my brother went off for college in Lexington, Kentucky but I remained in Louisville. We have always been very close and I missed him terribly. I never told him this (so why not share publicly?) but on many nights when he was gone, I’d have trouble sleeping and so I’d sneak into his room and lay in his bed. It’s weird, I know. But it gave me some comfort, and made me feel in some way that he was still around.
Now, some 13 years later, my brother has returned to Louisville. He has a family now – a wife and two of the most beautiful children in the world (I’m biased). I live in Charlotte now. I still miss him terribly.
When I was 21 years old I was lucky enough to make some of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. There wasn’t a moment we didn’t try to spend together that year. We literally did life together. We stayed over each other’s houses and apartments. We went to see movies and games together. We would go to church together, and then, even though homework and preparations for the week to come beckoned, we’d go to Robert’s apartment and sit and do whatever came up.
But my favorite moments were the times when we would find ourselves sitting on a porch or a couch somewhere, drinks in hand, and we would just sit and talk. We’d talk about everything: girls, classes, the meaning of life, the stars, the old stories that still made us laugh until it hurt. We’d talk about nothing, too. We’d sit and be so content with everything even if nothing was happening and we’d feel like we didn’t need to go anywhere or do anything else ever again.
A year later, I finished college and moved back to Louisville and all my friends stayed in Lexington. They were busy working jobs or starting graduate school and I was just stuck there in Louisville, waiting for the next steps.
Now all my friends are in Louisville. And once again, I am in a very different place. But all the while, I want for us to all be back together again, sitting on some porch, talking about everything and nothing all at once and feeling like there’s nothing in the whole world we could ever do that could be this good.
If you need more proof that time is like a spiral, I have nothing else to offer you than these stories. My life goes on in time: I get older, the new year turns, people are born and people die. But in a lot of ways I keep circling back.
I can only hope that as I keep circling back that I am growing, that my appreciation and my responses to the recurring elements of my life are deeper, richer, more patient, loving, and kind. I can only hope that I learn from my mistakes, even though I will surely commit them again. And I hope that I become more certain and more resolved about what I know really matters – and hold onto it for dear life.
Comments