What I know for sure is that freaking out about your student loan debt is useless. You’ll be okay. It’s only money. And it was money well spent.
So I stood up and tossed the other one over the edge too.
Aside from the people I love, there is little I value more than my education.
I was alone. I was barefoot. I was twenty-six years old and an orphan too. An actual stray, a stranger had observed a couple of weeks before, when I’d told him my name and explained how very loose I was in the world.
That job and the fifteen others I had before I graduated college were my own, personal “educational opportunities.” They changed my life for the better, though it took me a while to understand their worth.
She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.
Unlike Leif and Karen, who could hardly bear to be in our mother’s presence once she got sick, I couldn’t bear to be away from her. Plus, I was needed.
They opened my mind to realities I didn’t know existed. They forced me to be resilient, to sacrifice, to see how little I knew, and also how much.
They made my life big. They contributed to an education that money can’t buy.
I wasn’t even thinking, What have I gotten myself into? I was thinking only of moving myself forward. My mind was a crystal vase that contained only that one desire. My body was its opposite: a bag of broken glass. Every time I moved, it hurt. I counted my steps to take my mind off the pain, silently ticking the numbers off in my head to one hundred before starting over again. The blocks of numbers made the walk slightly more bearable, as if I only had to go to the end of each one.
Nella vita ci sono un’alba e un tramonto ogni giorno. E tu puoi scegliere di essere presente, puoi metterti sulla strada della bellezza.
I was a terrible believer in things, but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn’t know where to put my faith, or if there was such a place, or even precisely what the word faith meant, in all of its complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake. “You’re a seeker,” my mother had said to me when she was in her last week, lying in bed in the hospital, “like me.” But I didn’t know what my mother sought, exactly. Did she?
She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments.
Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.
The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.
We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, where we say we love them or not.
The only way you’ll find out if you “have it in you” is to get to work and see if you do.
This is not the way I wanted it to be, that single honey said, but it was the way it was.
We talk about our friends behind their backs. We do. Ask any social scientist who has studies human communication behaviors. Even you edmitted to doing this. Our friends are witnese to our attributes and flaws, our bad habits and good qualities, our contradictions and our contrivances. That they need to occasionally discuss the negative aspects or our lives and personalities in terms less than admiring is to be expected.
A caldera, it’s called – a sort of mountain in reverse. A mountain that’s had its very heart removed.