Youthful Life: X

 Joshua 1:9 " Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid;  do not be discouraged,  for the  Lord  your God will be with you wherever you go." I cannot believe I have now existed for a year of my life without my mom. It still doesn't feel real, and yet it is the reality of my life. That day and so many of the days that followed are seared into my brain unlike any other life experience. I woke up to a "call me when you wake up" text from my dad. I already knew. I called him and the sorrow, heartbreak, and devastation in his voice destroyed me. His final words before we ended the call "BJ go to school, Bianca go to work." I spent the rest the rest of day doing not much else but answering when people asked my why I was at school "because my told me to go." We sat on my bed crying, and crying, and crying, and holding hands, and crying until I had to throw up. Time came, and I had class so I put on clothes, put my headpho...

10/5/19 Dear Mommy, You are loved. We love you. I love you. You have lived a life well loved. That sentiment of a life well-loved is two-fold. You have been someone who has adored others with a love that can only be described as extraordinary, and been one to have been surrounded by love for all of your days. You were the embodiment of love. You were love exemplified. You were pure love in human form. What a grand gift it was to love and to be loved by you. Your love has been indescribable yet powerful beyond compare. Your love has been transcendent while being grounded. Your love has been everlasting even when we thought it would end. Your love, your love, your love, has changed the world, your world, our world, my world.             Mother to all, this life well-loved is represented by the number of people here and around the world thinking about you in this moment. Your impact is immeasurable. What you meant to people cannot ...

" Connections with other people affect not only the quality of our lives but also our survival." Dean Ornish Connection, connectivity, connectedness - we're yearning, longing, desperate for it . Existing in places and spaces untethered to others brings us a distinct sense of loneliness and isolation. We reach out to grab hold of anything or anyone that we feel any semblance of connection to. The first person to smile at us, whoever says anything to us, or who looks familiar to us - whatever flimsy connection we have forged is the one we gravitate to when we're left floating in the ether. Every time we enter a new place, have to get our bearings, and ground ourselves, we are looking for connection to anchor us in the unfamiliar. It can be a comfort food, a scent that brings us fond memories, or a symbol that represents sanctuary for us. If all else fails, observational connectivity factors in, and we make comments about things we notice in hopes that someone el...

" The failures that you beat yourself up over are the ones where you experienced warning signs and can connect the dots backwards after the fact." Caroline Ghosn Searching, yearning, looking for a sign. In the world around us, and the people that occupy it, we look for signs. Some kind of guidance, advice on who to be, or just affirmation that we are doing what we should be. There's this pressure, learned, and applied liberally that tells us there's both a right and a wrong way to exist. There's a values judgement applied to us and who we are. There is an assessment that we are constantly placing on ourselves, and onto others, and them unto us as to the righteousness of what we do. We look for signs to make sense of what goes on around us, about why the world is working the way it is, and about who we're meant to be. Signs have this power to both obscure, and to provide clarity when we seemingly need it most. Signs are all open to our interpretation. We ...

" An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings." Margaret MacMillan Stop apologizing for the harm other people cause you . Stop forgiving people before they have done the work to ask for it or to change. Stop letting well-meaning people or “good intentions” dismiss their impact. It’s their job to own their impact; not yours to rationalize it away. Hold people accountable for their actions and their impact. People don't get to barrel through lives or the world without being prompted to look back and see what they've left in their wake. When we don't address the harm and its cause we deny ourselves healing, and closure, and let someone continue their behavior without knowledge of its impact. If we care about people, particularly those close to us, we will hold them accountable. We are obligated ...

"Today I choose life. Every morning when I wake up I can choose joy, happiness, negativity, pain... To feel the freedom that comes from being able to continue to make mistakes and choices - today I choose to feel life, not to deny my humanity but embrace it." Kevyn Aucoin I am striving to feel, speak about, and share joy more often . In a world shrouded in darkness, doused in melancholy, and bludgeoned by critique, where is my joy? I have found myself giving voice to the gray when in reality most of my day are spent either mundane, or somewhere just north of contentment. I'm in homeostasis, an equilibrium if you will. I'm existing, and doing quite alright if not pretty well. I've become so used to articulating the moments that feel like less than without giving due process to their relational foils of happiness, joy, and peace. What's the impact? It creates a skewed perspective that is unrealistically monotone instead of bright, warm, and vibrant. I h...

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one." C.S. Lewis Adulthood is an adventure that no one really  knows how to navigate. In talking to my friends scattered all over the country and around the world, one of the consistent sentiments shared is having trouble making new friends. Making friends in adulthood is difficult but not impossible. That distinction is key. Adults are lonely. People are yearning for others who get them. Folks crave connection. No matter how closed off they might seem - it is a universal experience. A few or a lot of failed attempts does not mean we should give up where we are or on making friends in general. We have to keep trying, and try smart!  Quite honestly, the things we learned as kids to build our friendships still applies to striving the do the same thing in adulthood. Find something you have in common and build on it. Even more so, the principles from our col...

"Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses  the glory of being alone." Paul Tillich Adulthood is lonely . And by lonely, I mean the mere act of being by yourself. There is a difference between loneliness and just being alone. There's inherent value assessment there. The former comes with negative implication, and the latter is nothing more than an ambiguous state of being. I think we are socially conditioned to want the company of others, to be in contact, and to communicate. I also think we rely too much on others to determine who we are instead of spending the time needed to decide for ourselves who we are, and even more so to not decide who we are in relation to others. It's only natural. We spend the majority of our lives surrounded by people whether with be family, friends, or community - then, suddenly, you're on your own. Seeing other people becomes a deliberate act instead of a mundane reality. We have to do things of our ...

Truth - Clouds convey messages that we often ignore. Maybe it's because they are just up there existing that we don't pay much attention to them. They foreshadow, figuratively and literally, what potential dangers of the natural world lie ahead for us. Their absence just as much as presence signifies something unique. Their color, the ways they travel, and their coverage all drop hints as to what is to come. When they deposit rain, snow, or the infamous hail combined with lightning, gusts of wind, all hell can break loose. Just as easily as they admonish us of upcoming perils, they also are harbingers of goodness to come. Perfect shade, fanciful shapes, and even skywriting are all because of clouds.   " Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same." Ralph Waldo Emerson   Clouds have long been my favorite natural occurrence. I often find myself lackadaisically gazing at the infatuating puffs, whisps, and clumps of clouds that linger above me. I ...