mood :: mixtape

 "The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps." -Proverbs 16:9

 

Moving from one life stage to the next life stage should have clearer boundaries than it does. If I had my way, it'd be like the silence between two songs on a well-crafted mixtape.

But that's not how it usually goes.

Changing of life stages seems more like listening to the radio or Spotify playlist. Songs sort of crossfade together, but the songs rarely share the same key, tempo, or backbeat. So the crossfade sounds clunky, jarring, disjointed.

In my younger years, I'd craft many a mixtape for friends, crushes, acquaintances. If I included a song recorded from the radio, I wanted the entire song without a radio person's voice (a similar annoyance is when the GPS voice talks over your favorite part of a song to inform you of your next turn in two miles).

So for crafting a song running order, that brief space of silence did my mixtapes much good. No voice intrusions, no crossfade.

A tiny bit of silent space to demarcate life stages would also do some good. But that's not usually how it goes.

-Before graduating from high school, most seniors have figured out post-high school plans -- which is a crossfading one life stage with another.

-If you're shopping for new clothes at a store in public, you're required (by law) to shop while wearing clothes you already own. No one shows up to the store in their birthday suit (what else can be said about this?? -- some life crossfades are a net benefit for EVERYONE).

-You never know (at the time) when is the first time you make conversation with a lifelong friend. 

-When graduating college, the crossfade can start so early. What's the next step? Landing a job, graduate school, internship, year or two of volunteering. Something. The ceremony almost feels anticlimactic; a blast of dissonant trumpets amidst the crossfade of the rest of life.

And with each stage, the paths of beloved friends, which for many years have walked side-by-side, now chart different courses ... oh so gradually. It can be a mixture of excitement at what's coming next, and slow-motion heartache at the good that slowly fades out of sight.

There's many ways to look at how life moves from one season to the next. One way is that you're forever fashioning for yourself a mixtape, quite the playlist ... and you're doing so while living your daily, ordinary life.

Sometimes the transitions from one song to the next glide so seamlessly, and you think 'wow, that was smooth ... I am awesome. I've got life figured out.' Sometimes the crossfade between songs sounds raw, messy and abrupt, because that's also life, and you're going through it.

Some songs get added to the mixtape by someone else ... because it's a collaborative sorta endeavor, after all. 

Some songs will always break a piece of your heart.

Many songs cycle back though the playlist again, finding new energy in different life stages. 

Some songs only sound good when you hear them alone, driving at night in the summertime. 

Some songs will revive your spirit, again and again.

Many songs will appear once on your playlist, and they stick to that one life stage: a marker forever frozen to a time, a place, a person, an event.

Some songs you'll forget even made it onto the list. 

Many songs you'll never forget, but until you hear them again after a long time, you'll forget how good they really sound.

Some songs endure, and age well with you.

Hmmm ... maybe just maybe, as much as it annoys me at times, crossfades help.

Maybe just maybe -- as much as I'd wish to have all my life mixtape songs tidy, easily labeled and crisply demarcated -- that's just not how it usually plays out.

say the words (please, please)

Underneath my plate of Cheetos, grapes and cheddar popcorn, my sweaty hands fidgeted while I waited for the nearest chance in five years to say -- in person -- what I'd been praying and hoping and wishing to say to an old, estranged friend: 

"I'm sorry."

Five years of attempting to apologize, to connect with someone I'd hurt. A half decade of dialing this person's phone number, and it going straight to voicemail. Five years of unacknowledged emails. Five years of silence.

At the start of those five years, I felt affronted that my estranged friend would keep me two relational time zones away. After all, we'd hung out all the time in school. We were tight! An awesome, mutually beneficial, and loyal friendship withered to nothing.

 

But I remember,  after a particularly difficult conversation with this person, pridefully ending the call and declaring to myself, "I don't plan on reaching out to him ever again."

And I didn't. 

 

And my friend never called me again. That was that. 

Pride: it will rot the heart from the inside out.

Dry rot

With time, I had a humbler, clearer understanding on the mess I'd breezily created, and then left behind. It was part of my larger life direction that needed rerouting; it took me time to realize that God wished differently for my life. I began retroactively thinking of the people I had stepped on. Then a long, arduous road of repair, recovery, resurgence, and rejoicing took place. A dear friend referred to it as "one by one, those old clouds dissipating from your life."

I had forgiving to dispense, and forgiveness to seek.

[[Related tangent: One of my most appreciated songs of the past couple years is TS' 'All You Had To Do Was Stay.'  Sure, it's an ear worm. But there's deep roots below the pop sheen veneer. 

Its lyrical core describes an estranged relationship between two people who used to be close, a long time ago. One person who'd had taken the other for granted (but now might regret it), and one person who was taken for granted (and now might know it).

The reason I appreciate this song is because -- depending on the situation -- I've been one of both people. Maybe you have too.]]

So: five years after my starting this mess, this old friend and I were both attending at a mutual acquaintance's engagement party.

In the five years of trying to right this wrong, I'd come to bump up against some unmoving, yet grace-filled, requirements of forgiveness:

 

a) an apology should be unconditional, with no strings attached--

 

b) an apology should be specific, 

 

c) there's this encouraging word about forgiveness, 

 

d) whenever possible, the size and mode of the apology should be at least match the size and mode of the offense (i.e. if I were to hurt someone with something I said out loud, apologizing out loud is what's needed. Apologizing via text message, or DM, or through a friend isn't enough).

I wanted to apologize because I knew it was what my friend rightfully deserved. It was what I owed. Time, maturity, and the Lord did much to get my head straight.

Thankfully, I looked him in the eye, apologized for what I did, the mess I willfully made, and how I had been. My friend apologized too, and we smiled, and hugged. 

 

That was that.

It was a relief to turn that heavy, heavy page.

Who's out there to whom you owe an apology? 

 

What faces, or smiles, come to your mind as you read this? 

 

If you're trying to reach out to correct a past wrong of yours, but you're being stiff-armed, keep pursuing the chance to apologize.

 

It's worth it, regardless of how they receive it.

 

We've all been there, on both sides of the apology.

"Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you." -Ephesians 4:32

sweat, and more sweat

 

The phrase ‘never let them see you sweat’ spread through our collective lexicon via an 80's antiperspirant deodorant commercial, of all places. The product sold well.

But I can at times act as though that axiom should apply everywhere -- whatever I set myself to do, it  needs to look like I've done it a million times, I'm prepared for every possible scenario, and it'll look smooth as silk to anyone who could be watching. No mistakes. No doodling, and starting over. Like an intro for a movie, I just want to skip over the long, tedious hours and practice it takes to improve at something.

Do you approach your self-critique this way? No room for off-days, no wiggle space for the inevitable face plant? That's a rough way to live. It doesn't work. 

Or maybe that's not how you self-critique, but others in your life -- perhaps well-meaning voices -- do come off this way to you. If only these folks could hear knew how counterproductive this was.

I had a professor in graduate school tell me that sometimes, we do get to cross a finish line on our to-do list with much fanfare, barely looking like we exerted effort along the way. Confetti and hype galore. 

But much more often, the prof said we limp and shuffle ourselves along, adorned with cuts and scrapes from tripping and tumbling upon the asphalt of life. That's the reality. That's the norm.

My pastor has sometimes talked about Jesus' story of the house built on the rock in relation to when a hurricane plows through a city. In the aftermath, the news stories inevitably will show the damage done. There's always a few houses still standing along those streets, but they never, EVER look pristine. It looks like they've endured a hurricane. Windows boarded up. A mess all over the yard. Trees fallen in the driveway.

No one would expect those surviving houses to look real-estate photo ready. They look weathered and worn, and it's totally normal.

Sometimes we endure struggles and times of serious testing. It's reasonable and expected that, if that's a time of life we happen to be mucking through, we would look like it.

'Never let them see you sweat?' 

It's a good ad line, but an unrealistic way to try to live.

boredom is a friend we need

 

Boredom kinda seems like that acquaintance/friend you’ve met once or twice, and the conversation kinda lagged. Then you’re both invited to hang with mutual friends, but everyone bails except you two … so you hang out, even though you don’t like spending time with boredom. You're not sure how it's supposed to go, how to keep the conversation going. And the passing of the time downshifts from the speedy hum of wireless ... to that clunkiness of analog.

Boredom kinda seems like that it recognizes that song that points out our aversion to it: “Why are you so petrified of silence … here, can you handle this?!? [SILENCE for a few seconds] Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines, or when you think you’re gonna die / Or did you long for the next distraction?” Many of us seek out that next distraction … attending our eyes from computer screen, to smartphone screen, to computer screen, to tablet screen, to smartphone screen, all the day through. Raise your hand if this is also you (it's not totally your fault ... these devices are purposefully designed to perpetuate this behavior).

There’s this phenomenon where, during the night hours, we can hear AM radio stations much, much farther away from their signal source. It has to do with the refractive layers of the ionosphere being higher from the earth's surface at night than the daytime. I see this as a canopy over the earth, being lifted higher on cue every night ... to open the windows of the sky and let fresh air in, as it were.

I sometimes imagine our inner reality in this way ... when we're hustling to avoid having to hang out with boredom (because we prefer our familiar distractions) there's so much to find to attend to, and accomplish, to peruse. Deadlines. Projects. Catching up. Staying in touch. Watching that show. Deleting old emails {(then reading old emails you were supposed to be deleting). Cleaning your room. Cleaning your car. Responding to those texts. Checking back in with the parents. (Slightly) rearranging the closet. Such mundanities can keep that canopy from being lifted beyond where we prefer.

But when boredom lifts our inner canopy, there's this whole other kind of mulling, discerning, heart pondering that can occur. The questions tend to be less deadline-driven urgent, but just as important.

Is this relationship good for me and what I want, long-term? 

Am I doing what I'm doing because I'm trying to please (or appease) others, or is this what I want to do?

Why do I wear this shirt, even though I don't like it that much? 

Why did that friendship of mine fall away, and what role did I have in that? 

Whoa, where the heck is that smell coming from? 

How can I open myself up more to people, to make new friends? 

How can I relate differently to my family? 

How can I resist fear and anxiety from unduly limiting my life choices?

Seriously, what is causing that smell?? That's kinda nasty.

How do I tell my friend how proud I am of her?

What am I thankful for today?

Boredom allows space for these questions so we can meander about with them -- the canopy lifted so any weightiness isn't so compressed it's knocking us over. 

Boredom doesn't demand immediate answers, or immediate fixes. Boredom can help show us how to be around ourselves. It invites into the places of ourselves we don't often explore. It helps us get used to a more sustainable pace of living (because really, that life pace you're trying to keep up with? You know that won't work long-term). We're created not just to do, but to be. There's more to us than what we've done, where we've failed, where we've succeeded, who our parents are, where we come from.

So here's to boredom as a friend we need, among other friends.

With this, my hope and prayer for you is that when boredom sends that text that it wants to hang out ... you sometimes invite it over to hang out, and then set aside the screen in front of you for awhile. Y'all can kick around some of these important questions that life's deadline urgency always pushes aside. 

And while you're at it, figure out where that smell's coming from.