I’ve been struggling with the thoughts that leaving for four months in the middle of my senior year was a mistake. I put my life on hold and flew off to a foreign country to have some fun. I paused my photography business, said hold on to my friends, and left my major classes to finish my last semester. I’m scared I cannot get back to where I once was with business or my spot in photography world due to be being connected of the constant competitive world via internet. I’m at the end now realizing, this was more than just having fun in a cute European city. These four months have shaped my world view into a new reality. A reality where silence is a melody for the soul, where time is not measured by a clock but by the sun and moon, and where simplicity meets its maker.
These four months have taught me to value the relationship between time and space, to recognize how the architecture of time allows room for community and creation on the same page. I’ve learned to create is to be human. Just as we are made in God’s likeness, creation is sewed into our DNA, we cannot escape the desire or intrinsic pleasure of creating. I’ve created friendships that have dug a deep well that what I found was a pool of conversation I never knew existed. I’ve created books, paper, and sewed them to be one. I’ve created a simple scene on canvas out of complex words to big for me to even reiterate. I’ve created wine out of grapes and pasta out of eggs. All that I have done within the five inches of bone and flesh, I treasured and tasted the goodness of a simple life. A life not caught up in who is dating who, what is higher than what, or how I look every second of every day. But a life of the sweet pleasure of simplicity, creating for meaning. Creating to better understand the world we are in and the One who made it. Not just for competition sake or to get a good grade. But how blessed I am to be set free from those expectations America has smothered me with all the years I’ve set my hands to create.
I am at the end. The end is always scary. It wants to wrap up everything and put it into a neat pretty box than try and explain the entirety in a few simple sentences. But we all know those pretty neat boxes never stay the way they were wrapped. It gets messy, gets undone with all the good and the bad. The box was never meant to be placed around the whole at all. We humans were the ones to create the box in the first place. God doesn’t use boxes, He uses melodies, poems, sunrises, photographs, paintings, voices, dreams. Endings were never meant to be summarized into three neat sentences but rather knitted into the heart and carried along, stopping every once in a while to verbalize the complexity of the whole.
I shouldn’t be afraid of the end because the end is where the next story beginnings. And with the beginning comes all the experiences, theories, creations of the last ending. I don’t much believe in endings actually, just a turing of the page.
