One of my favorite prayers is not surprisingly from a Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called "Patient Trust." Depending on what's going on in my life, different parts of the prayer speak to me and remind me to step back, breathe, and have hope.
Today I'm struck by the ending line about accepting "the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete." This is exactly how I feel right now. I feel a high level of anticipation, but it's not worry or negative anticipation or even obsession. I just feel anticipatory. During one of the orientation sessions at the beginning of my volunteer year, we each had to choose a word from a list of "emotion/feeling words" to describe how we were feeling so far that week. One of my housemates choose "anticipatory" and I've loved the word ever since. It's different than anxiety and has a lot of other emotions wrapped up in it, but as my roommate said, it's just the overall feeling of "something's coming."
Something's coming? What could possibly be coming? I have no idea. I couldn't even begin to guess. I don't even feel like a huge amount of change is coming, at least not in the near future. Sometimes I've felt this anticipation when I know the program is working something out in me, and I'm on the brink of some major self-revelation. I've felt this way when I've been in class and have been uncovering new levels of creativity and art-making ideas. I've felt this way, obviously, around applying to grad school or applying for jobs or when I've been about to make a life-changing move. But this time, none of that is on the horizon, not near enough to having me feeling anticipation around it yet. If something's coming, it's something down the road, something I don't quite see yet or something small and (seemingly insignificant) right now that may have some greater meaning in the future. I don't know. And I don't really care. Honestly, right now I'm just enjoying feeling myself in suspense, and in complete. :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment