-Good Old War
Wowee! Well, this is a new set up/format for blogging. I don't quite know how I feel about it. Haha. I suppose it shall just take some adjusting...
Anyhow, I came to share.
I just got back from a 2-week choir tour on Monday night and I've just been boppin' around at my sister's apartment, welcoming friends to take me wherever they go and looking for jobs/internships. Suuuuper exciting. Ha.
I got an internship in Santa Monica with a really cool company, but I need a car for the internship, which I do not have, so that didn't pan out. Awesome.
I've called a few venues and emailed out a few resumes in hopes of figuring out what my life will look like this summer...eep!
Mostly, I wanted to share something I learned over choir tour. To give a background, in the beginning of the tour I was not enjoying myself. I have the tendency to be the one that people forget about...it just happens that way. I had two main friend groups, but they were all closer with each other than I was with any of them, so I was kind of teetering between them, trying to find my place. On the bus, in small groups, at the dinner table, on free days, I just didn't know where to go.
One of the busses did not have the anti-septic smell stuff or whatever it is put in the bathroom, so by day two it smelled of an arid mixed urine stench. That being said, everyone tried to cram on the other two busses. Of course, no one saved me a seat. So I had to trudge along over to the "smelly bus" by my lonesome (not really, there were about fifteen other unhappy campers on that bus as well). On top of that, it was the day of an EIGHT hour bus ride. OF COURSE. So here I was, sitting on the bus by myself, just incredibly uncomfortable. I was frustrated and irritated. The thing is, my top strength (according to the Gallop strengthsfinder test) is "Includer" so when things like this happen, it is just foreign to me because in my mind, I would try my absolute best to never forget about anyone.
Anyhow, I was sitting there, pouting. But I got in some decent sleep time, watched "A Beautiful Mind" for the first time and LOVED IT and got to play some Catchphrase in the back. Overall, it was a positive experience.
After I got over myself and decided to quit thinking selfishly (Why isn't this happening for me? Why is this happening TO me? etc.) I enjoyed myself times four million. It is so much better to not be concerned with your standing and just enjoy where you are in the moment. I knew all of this, but I was really good at ignoring it. Ha.
Now fast-forward to the end of tour when we're driving to our final destination. I was sitting on the bus by myself (voluntarily this time) and I was looking around at all the people with whom I had spent the last two weeks. I was thinking about how I had learned so much about what it means to be a part of something. Then I had this thought:
Man. You really can't be a part of something until you serve it. I was being so selfish thinking about my experiences and how I could get the most out of any given situation. But honestly, all I needed to do was serve. Until you know how a mechanism works, you can't serve a purpose. The group I was in, required a certain understanding before I could just join on in. I could contribute my voice to the choir and cheers to the orchestra, but I was not truly a part of something bigger than myself until I had taken part in serving others and the needs of the group as a whole. Kind of like a recipe. You can put whatever you want into a bowl and hope for the best, but until you read a recipe and understand the role of each component to the success of the food, you'll probably come up with nothing that satisfies (to the culinarily inclined: you are exempt from this illustration). Or a clock; you can throw cogs and gizmos into a clock and pray that it accurately tells you the time at any given moment, but until you actually understand how each cog interacts and coexists with the others, and then proceed to use that understanding to put it together for a greater purpose, then it's useless.
I don't really know if I'm making any sense, here. I understand myself (go figure). But I just really wanted to attempt to put my thoughts into an outlet that might be deemed useful by someone someday; maybe even myself.
Anyhow, that's that.
Here's a picture of some of the wonderful cogs I got to mesh with while on tour:
Enjoy life and don't stop looking for the best in every situation. Remind yourself: I'm not better than anyone to think that I deserve more than the least of these.
peace.
-3:19pm
