Little Fictions

Congratulations on your graduations, everyone in the Class of 2011! Of course, this could mean that I am congratulating myself, but sometimes that's appropriate. Also, I primarily mean for this to celebrate high school graduates - particularly those brave enough to admit that they don't know what they're doing next.

I went to two parties yesterday (yay Josiah and Alex, if you ever read this), and today our whole family packed up and took off to Ohio for the afternoon to party with Emelia and the Denggs. My family. There was good food, some games (which I observed rather than joining), wine tasting (thank you, Uncle Mark, for homemade wine:), and conversation. It is the last of these which left me curious and conflicted, and about which I will write here.

Grandpa Dengg loves me very much. I suppose I have been very blessed to have known all four of my grandparents (5, if you count C and T's grandma, Aldean), and to know that they loved me. I am even more blessed to still have Grandpa Dengg, to have him send cards and try to find out what's going on in my life. The only problem is that he doesn't remember so well - today he called me over so he could tell Aunt Pat what I'm doing right now, and he said that I was shoeing horses.

Before you laugh at the ridiculosity, I suppose you should know that that was in the plan. Quite a while ago, but still... it seemed like something I could do, and something that would pay well once I was through training. It would have fit right in with my life-plan of being a large animal veterinarian. He was really excited about it when we talked about it around Grandma's kitchen table 5 years ago.

It's harmless, I know, but I still wonder what to do with this. It happened at Easter, too. I just smile and say, "That was a few years ago..." and if people ask, I say that I spent a year on a Ranch after high school. True, but there was no actual shoeing involved. How does one tell one's grandfather that he is, in fact, mistaken about one's entire life-plan? Enlighten me, please.

This is really just at the foundation of a whole bunch of questions. When you graduate high school, you're supposed to know where you're going, what you're doing. Graduating college has the same implications - each step into maturity supposedly comes with a set of clearer instructions than the last one. But what if it doesn't? My experience has been that I become more aware of the opportunities and challenges ahead, but where I will actually end up becomes more vague.

More exciting, perhaps, but much more vague.

I spent a lot of my high school years with a false sense of certainty, and God worked long and hard to break me of it so that he could point me to the humanities rather than science. I have a great deal of respect for people who, at graduation, are courageous enough to admit that they are "undeclared." There's no shame in not knowing what God has no yet revealed, and it might save you from having to deal with some of the Little Fictions that could come up otherwise.

worth doing badly

Bold words to be followed by four months of silence. Again, I can only say that I am a coward whose braveness shines through only when I have had plenty of sleep and am particularly upset about something. But perchance courage is not what I should be seeking. Sometimes I wonder why I write at all, since no one will see or read these words, and anyone who does will likely not comment. But my advisor, Terry Thomas, has drilled this quote into my head in the last few weeks, and it has given me a new perspective.

A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it without any hope of fame and money, but even practises it without any hope of doing it well. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
G.K. Chesterton

Do I believe this? Is writing and thinking and writing about my thinking something that I love enough to do badly, that I will share even though I fail? Apparently, since I have been journalling and blogging for nearly ten years. So I am back, yet again, free for the summer, and I hope to share happy thoughts here, as well as a few sad, and a few challenging, as the need arises.

As a brief update - I recently graduated, and am currently unemployed in Greenland. More like the Pittsburgh environs, but we've had enough rain for it truly to be a green land, although a massive flood may overtake us yet. I might be getting a job with the post office, having successfully navigated through the governmental hoops required for such a job. I sat in on a summer class just for fun, and I look forward to taking my first graduate class in two weeks. College grad that I am, I still don't know exactly where I am going or what I want to do.

We shall see how very much I love this thing worth doing...