I was catapulted from my year of volunteering into real life. I have come to see that during the course of my year, I was living in a mystical duality. Life was slow, slow enough to sit for family dinners and spend time with my neighbors on a weekly basis and chat with people on my walk to work. But life was fast, filled constantly with experiences and discussions and prayers and thoughts that stretched me and kept me from laziness and selfishness. Life was full enough that what I may have normally experienced in several years going at society’s self-focused pace, I experienced in one ridiculously structured and others-minded year. And yet I was happy. No, not happy. Filled with joy.
Now that I’m done with my ‘year’ and moved onto real life, I’ve not been able to find my barings. To find in everyday life the pace which is realistic and the peace that is necessary is a very difficult thing to do alone. Find. This is the word, the concept that is haunting me, HAS haunted me. Will I find—find a sense of balance, a calling, an understanding…will I one day have a moment of epiphany after I’ve read and digested just the right mix of philosophy and theology and autobiographical memoirs that lead to my personal understanding of how a life is to be lived well? Must I create this sense of balance? Or…. can I receive it? We look and look and look. And seek and search some more.
I have come to believe that this seeking is the finding. That the journey, the honest search, with divine guidance, is where the important things of life will slowly settle into their resting places as the other not-so-important things get shuffled out. Though the scale of balance sometimes leans or falls, it will always comes back to center with an earnest heart and genuine reverence for life’s truths.
