Keep walking

I started walking down this road again, just recently. I mean that literally, as in walking down an actual road that exists in one of the cities I frequent. I avoided it in for a while because I had to let go of one of the reasons to go there, and well…frankly, it just felt weird and painful to go there again. I picked alternate routes for a while, until I had a long talk with a friend and she told me:  “You should start walking down that road again. It’s just a road, you know.”

So I decided to start passing by there again. It is just a road, after all. Plus, avoiding it meant I had to spend a little more when I head home after a visit to that city, so convenience and practicality won me over.

The first time I was there I was with some friends, so it wasn’t that bad. The second time, I was alone but it was a holiday so it wasn’t too bad, either. The third time, however, I was so nervous that I speed-walked all the way, and I got so stressed as I got home because I walked in almost panic. Crazy.

What’s the big deal about this? Sometimes I wonder if I am doing the right thing with all that, with making that first choice to avoid, and then changing my mind and going back. It’s just a place. But I’m the kind of person who put too much importance on things like these sometimes, like how I put importance on a type of scent because it reminds me of a trip, or a certain scrap of paper because it came with a gift. I’m sentimental like that. Other people think it’s weird, I know, and I’m pretty sure they’d think I should purge or something, because why am I being such a masochist, anyway?

But the thing is…well, I don’t know, really. I guess this is still me wanting to be brave, to say to the little things and circumstances: No, you will not defeat me. I will not fear you. So I plow on, and walk, because how else can you go down that road if you don’t walk?

And I actually like walking. It can get a bit tiring, but I get something every time I walk. Endorphins, what have you. So…I keep on walking.

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I haven’t shared some links in this blog for articles/stuff I found online in the past months, so yay, let’s do that now.

• dear hilary: a gradual slope (the wild love)
  

  I wanted to tell us that hearts mend on a gradual slope. You walk through each day and notice one hundred things. You walk through the next, and perhaps you only notice 97, perhaps there are three things, the way he holds a coffee cup, the laugh he has when he heard something that makes him nervous as well as happy, the sound of his fingers against a keyboard, that somehow fade. And the next day, maybe something comes back, and something else leaves, and time is the healer not because time makes anyone less the wonder that you always knew them to be, but because we move in the slow swirl of the months and days, and we are freed by the movement.
  

• I want to throw a party for the heartbreak that turned you into a poet (Sarah Christine Schwartz)
  

  We’re no longer content sitting around waiting for things to fall nicely into place, no longer satisfied dreaming about the day we get it all together. Because we are young and alive, and this-moment-right-now is our whole lives, and that is reason enough to grab it with all of our strength, lead it to the dance floor, and tango.

• Requited (the adventures of a girl on the way)
  

  I look around me and I see so many bright, startling, beautiful souls. People with hearts so big and minds so sharp and laughs so loud – people who seek to spend time with me, who sit and talk for hours with me, who love me. And they are so quick to say so. People I love, love me back. People I love, love me as much as I love them. I can’t believe that’s possible. I can’t believe God has blessed me with reciprocated love.

• dear hilary: keep a vigil (the wild love)
  

  Be unafraid to keep it messy. Be unafraid to have days when you don’t want to watch, when you run and your hands brush your face and you wonder why you have been called to this. Be unafraid of how your heart is fragile and is breaking, always breaking, because in breaking it is freed again and again for that refrain, which I know you can hear echoing – a friend loves at all times.

• To Whom It May Concern (LifeTeen)
  

  We live in a culture that feeds both men and women so many lies about what we’re worth and what life is all about. I knew that somewhere out there was a girl who was probably struggling with the same questions that I was, so I wanted to pray for her. It was okay that I didn’t know who she was, because I knew that God had known her from before all of time.

• when God allows us to say when (Preston G. Yancey)
  

  In my office, faced with this loud heart woman asking about all the real things, I find myself handing her the peace that has been my own in these moments of wondering wander: I believe God allows us to say when. I believe that God allows us to throw up our hands at all the questions and say, “This one thing, this one particular thing, this is the question I can handle for right now and for this season. Meet me in it and may the rest come when it is the right time to answer them.”

• 14 july 2013: all these panes (Sunday Morning)
  

  I have shaped with my flimsy fingers so many metaphors about you but lately the one that seems to hold true the most is this: your love is a closed window, and I am throwing pebbles at it wishing you would crack  it open, just an inch or two, let the same shy breeze that kisses my jaw travel toward your pale, tired face.

• I Am Not Enough for Him (Prodigal Magazine)
  

  I knew the next morning, when I woke up, the pain would come like heavy clouds, like the storm that was starting slow now, but was miles away. For now it was mild. For now I was safe under the freshness of the situation, and I felt secure in his integrity, in his ability to talk about something when I couldn’t.

  But I also knew I wouldn’t escape the downpour.

• Move, Heal (everyday isa)
  

  Love is always love, even if it doesn’t look the way we expect it to look. You are loved beyond reason, beyond measure, beyond every high and lofty hope, and it might not take you on dates or cuddle you at night or whisper sweet-nothings into your ear but it is still every bit as true and real and healing as you could ever dream it to be.

• The First Time (Mindy Nettifee)
  

  Maybe no one ever told you,
  But the heart IS a metaphor.
  Yours is growing so strong
  You’ll have your rhythm back any day now—

  Loving like rumours spread.
  Dreaming like lunatic spacemen jump from their suits.
  Living like you never forgot how.