Just When I Think It's All Coming Together...

...something or some things come spectacularly apart.

It hasn't been an easy decision to forego the Peace Corps. You don't just, you know, up and quit that, throw down your apron or your vest with flair or your paper hat and stomp on it. Because, really, how do you 'quit' an ideal? A philanthropy? How do you 'give up on' a life's work?

What are we without what we call the courage of our convictions, without our specific brands of charging in on white horses with banners held high, with swords at the ready, and all that? It's a difficult thing to surmount, when your failure is greater because the endeavor involves what you believe is larger than you are, is a conduit to contribution to what's 'bigger than yourself'.

We're all so convinced, aren't we, of one thing or the other-of our infinite smallness in comparison to the world, to each other; of our invincibility, of how we oversee even what we can't see?

Well, sure then.

What's bigger?

Where do all the bits fit, the bits being us? Into the sectioned and cordoned-off world, the bodegas and favelas and slums. Into the city. Into the mountains or out onto the water. Where do we put all this intention of good, when the first plan fails, and we've failed to make another? What the hell am I supposed to do, I've been asking, with this shambles of a summer-into fall, with the idealism and the enthusiasm I thought I'd built up for sharing it?

Boy oh boy is that a hard question. For a few days, I'd have liked to curl up and give in. To return to making paychecks and paying bills and the unsatisfying currency of the same old same. And yet this is only because I recognize the ease with which I might slide into that trap-the trap we're all in, partially anyway, our entire lives: trapped by comfort, by relative affluence, by how easy it is to un-know. To ignore.

I don't want to do this, this media-driven, culturally-acceptable (not just in North America, but everywhere, somehow) coast through most of life. I'm looking into AmeriCorps now, because, as everyone says, there are problems in this country too, and people in need. Mostly I'm looking into change, a move, to keep moving. Rolling stones, as they say. The adage is true. Much of my disappointment comes from losing the opportunity to travel, to jump off to explore what's over another edge. My disappointment comes from the potential to disappoint others-and yet therein is another comparison: would they love me more if I did more/were more/knew more?

There's that too, isn't there? Love as learning. Learning to love not as you think you deserve, but as the ones you love deserve. And I know through their responses that the people who love me are doing just that, telling me over and over and over again in whichever way they choose that there is a bottom line here, a be-all-end-all: love. Nothing more and nothing less (what is ever more, and who deserves less?).

Oh, these shoes that may never drop, the ones we wait for, heavy with the dirt of what we want, and what we think we need to accomplish. These ways in which we sleep fitfully, wondering when someone will pinch us. I know I'm loved, and am thankful for it eternally.

I know what it is to love in return, and how best to handle, now, the twists and turns I'm given, the evolution, the shocks and bittersweet surprises. The frustrations.

Ask a favor of what you cannot see.
And then?

Count to ten.
Count to ten.
Count to ten.