Futures
If the font is weird, please ignore, I couldn't find out how to fix it. If it's normal, then fixed.
Hello dear readership, friends, and loved ones.
A lot has changed since you and I talked (or I talked and you, graciously, listened.) I'm not writing to reveal any new and half-baked blogging projects, just to put my thoughts down on the virtual page. Allow me to set the scene. Having just finished the latest in a long lineage of ill-fated clementines, I listen to lofi music on Spotify and revel in solitude. You're here, of course, and so is my dog (who likes clementines, I discovered today) but my family is sequestered by a half-closed door and good headphones.
A quick list of changes in my life to give context. I am eating plant based food and feel much better(vegan except honey, beeswax, and used leather/wool, if we're getting precise). I am taking varied courses; diff eq, world lit, and hiking soften the sharpness of pure STEM that was my last semester. I am creating more and not relegating creativity to the realm of breaks and future. I am happily single. I am doing more jiu jitsu and have a schedule that is much kinder to me. The person I want to become is clearer to me, and she is someone who seeks God first. I have four fewer teeth than I did last year. A godly and prayerful woman is mentoring me. I have watched a significant amount of anime over break. I am not as afraid to fail as I once was.
Here's a think-through regarding my future and how I'm dealing with the unfolding. A dilemma has presented itself, and I am curious about the outcome. Life and time will see the solution, but I'm not there yet. These are not choices I have to make all at once, but I'm thinking about them a lot, especially when the future looms rather than inspires.
I enjoy and sometimes obsess over learning, particularly physics. One of my dreams (and no matter how pretentious it sounds, it's true) is to go to grad school at a top institute and be a physics professor. I can see a rocky but real path towards this, involving years learning and helping others learn about the music of the spheres, the dances of particles, reductionism redeemed in accurate simplicity. This is a beautiful possibility, and I know in the depths of myself that with God on my side I am capable of this, and that it would be a good future.
(Physics,
physics,
and more physics.)
I am also a girl who wants very much to live like the painter Ursula in Kiki's Delivery Service, a movie I highly recommend. (For the Unenlightened). Ursula is an artist who lives in a cabin in the woods. She makes friends quickly, doesn't really worry about things, and is comfortable in her own skin. Ursula is one of many people, real and fictional, who have inspired me; I too want to spend my time visiting friends and making things (music, literature, and visual art) in a small house in the forest, caring about things that matter to me.
To quote entries in my journal, which range in timeframe but not in content. "I want to travel, live in a smallish house with greenery, live debt free, bike to work, work with my hands, write books, read books, keep bees and a garden, have long hair, climb trees, take classes, drink tea, go to church, speak other languages, sleep under the stars." "I am not going to go into this semester and wither to the whim of all school and no play. I am going to intentionally set time aside and play, write, sing, draw, dance, strum, sew, try fail- Oh to fail and laugh and get back up!"
My dad and I talked about this while washing the dishes together, and in five minutes he had narrated a way for me to achieve a life like Ursula's. "Let's say you get your degree, work for two years at 50k a year, live frugally enough to save 50k. Buy half an acre, build a 300 square foot house, put in some solar for a few lights and things to charge your laptop, get a solar well. Use the industrial revolution to your advantage. Then go buy paints and a guitar and lug out your typewriter and play with them. Bike to see your friends, travel, work, learn, it's your life."
This is far more attractive to me. It tugs at my heartstrings, lines up with where I believe myself to be right now.
I have questions for myself, for the academics, for the young and uncertain.
Do I have to choose? How can I have both?
Knowns: God has a plan, and both these worlds are integral parts of who I am as a person. There's no need for mutual exclusivity, except that artificially created by the environments and routes into which I place myself and from which I can remove myself. Yay, autonomy! In the same journal: "I could write a thousand poems, I could listen to the same song for hours. I'm drunk on nerdisms and fibonacci numbers...."
I could get into the fragmentation of modern education, how broad and integrated classical education was in the "good old days" (during which there was no toilet paper, avocado prevalence, or vaccine against polio, may I remind you), and start using quotes from King Lear that I have to look up to sound smart. Nah. I guess what I am trying to say, and thank you for bearing with me, is that I am facing some life changes with school and adulthood, and I don't know where they will take me. I don't see a single solution to my infinity of questions. But maybe I don't need one single solution but am instead piecing together a puzzle of many colors, shapes, and meanings. Eclectic. I have been getting to know myself better over the past year of uncertainty, and know that she is capable of living her life, and not the life others have set out for her, with God by her side. If my calculations are correct, this probably means a life devoted to learning in both the sciences and the arts, a solar powered tiny house influenced by the work of my future students or colleagues, books on the bookshelf and on the word processor, music on the record player and in the studio with my friends, missions both locally and across the globe, and a familiarity and peace you cannot find without Christ.
Hello dear readership, friends, and loved ones.
A lot has changed since you and I talked (or I talked and you, graciously, listened.) I'm not writing to reveal any new and half-baked blogging projects, just to put my thoughts down on the virtual page. Allow me to set the scene. Having just finished the latest in a long lineage of ill-fated clementines, I listen to lofi music on Spotify and revel in solitude. You're here, of course, and so is my dog (who likes clementines, I discovered today) but my family is sequestered by a half-closed door and good headphones.
A quick list of changes in my life to give context. I am eating plant based food and feel much better(vegan except honey, beeswax, and used leather/wool, if we're getting precise). I am taking varied courses; diff eq, world lit, and hiking soften the sharpness of pure STEM that was my last semester. I am creating more and not relegating creativity to the realm of breaks and future. I am happily single. I am doing more jiu jitsu and have a schedule that is much kinder to me. The person I want to become is clearer to me, and she is someone who seeks God first. I have four fewer teeth than I did last year. A godly and prayerful woman is mentoring me. I have watched a significant amount of anime over break. I am not as afraid to fail as I once was.
Here's a think-through regarding my future and how I'm dealing with the unfolding. A dilemma has presented itself, and I am curious about the outcome. Life and time will see the solution, but I'm not there yet. These are not choices I have to make all at once, but I'm thinking about them a lot, especially when the future looms rather than inspires.
I enjoy and sometimes obsess over learning, particularly physics. One of my dreams (and no matter how pretentious it sounds, it's true) is to go to grad school at a top institute and be a physics professor. I can see a rocky but real path towards this, involving years learning and helping others learn about the music of the spheres, the dances of particles, reductionism redeemed in accurate simplicity. This is a beautiful possibility, and I know in the depths of myself that with God on my side I am capable of this, and that it would be a good future.
(Physics,
physics,
and more physics.)
I am also a girl who wants very much to live like the painter Ursula in Kiki's Delivery Service, a movie I highly recommend. (For the Unenlightened). Ursula is an artist who lives in a cabin in the woods. She makes friends quickly, doesn't really worry about things, and is comfortable in her own skin. Ursula is one of many people, real and fictional, who have inspired me; I too want to spend my time visiting friends and making things (music, literature, and visual art) in a small house in the forest, caring about things that matter to me.
To quote entries in my journal, which range in timeframe but not in content. "I want to travel, live in a smallish house with greenery, live debt free, bike to work, work with my hands, write books, read books, keep bees and a garden, have long hair, climb trees, take classes, drink tea, go to church, speak other languages, sleep under the stars." "I am not going to go into this semester and wither to the whim of all school and no play. I am going to intentionally set time aside and play, write, sing, draw, dance, strum, sew, try fail- Oh to fail and laugh and get back up!"
My dad and I talked about this while washing the dishes together, and in five minutes he had narrated a way for me to achieve a life like Ursula's. "Let's say you get your degree, work for two years at 50k a year, live frugally enough to save 50k. Buy half an acre, build a 300 square foot house, put in some solar for a few lights and things to charge your laptop, get a solar well. Use the industrial revolution to your advantage. Then go buy paints and a guitar and lug out your typewriter and play with them. Bike to see your friends, travel, work, learn, it's your life."
This is far more attractive to me. It tugs at my heartstrings, lines up with where I believe myself to be right now.
I have questions for myself, for the academics, for the young and uncertain.
Do I have to choose? How can I have both?
Knowns: God has a plan, and both these worlds are integral parts of who I am as a person. There's no need for mutual exclusivity, except that artificially created by the environments and routes into which I place myself and from which I can remove myself. Yay, autonomy! In the same journal: "I could write a thousand poems, I could listen to the same song for hours. I'm drunk on nerdisms and fibonacci numbers...."
I could get into the fragmentation of modern education, how broad and integrated classical education was in the "good old days" (during which there was no toilet paper, avocado prevalence, or vaccine against polio, may I remind you), and start using quotes from King Lear that I have to look up to sound smart. Nah. I guess what I am trying to say, and thank you for bearing with me, is that I am facing some life changes with school and adulthood, and I don't know where they will take me. I don't see a single solution to my infinity of questions. But maybe I don't need one single solution but am instead piecing together a puzzle of many colors, shapes, and meanings. Eclectic. I have been getting to know myself better over the past year of uncertainty, and know that she is capable of living her life, and not the life others have set out for her, with God by her side. If my calculations are correct, this probably means a life devoted to learning in both the sciences and the arts, a solar powered tiny house influenced by the work of my future students or colleagues, books on the bookshelf and on the word processor, music on the record player and in the studio with my friends, missions both locally and across the globe, and a familiarity and peace you cannot find without Christ.
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