[summer]

I am moving. Granted, the movement is not entirely graceful; I’m doing some awkward combination of climbing over snow banks and running/lurching against irritated wind.  But the brown ice chunks underfoot and sickly branches lining the road become attractive, somehow, with forward motion.  My mind clears with each section of the sidewalk I pass over. Running to me is sanity and the best way I know how to simplify, because I need nothing besides ears to listen and feet to lift and set back down.

Oh January. Just an hour earlier, I was standing in the middle of my room, mind skipping over itself, insides flustered. The day was bulging with noise and people and needs. My window view was no help: some cars, some people, and a whole lot of snow…all of it sketched in shades of grey.  Some might think New England assigns too much meaning to its weather, but living through this winter makes it easy to believe that everything is more or less affected by the sky. I shuffle some papers here, pick up my phone over there, return to the center of the room to survey the chaos. Anyone watching the process would laugh. I wonder if this is this what clutter does to us. As I spastically try to organize my time and work into clean boxes and grids, I am overwhelmed with the need to return to something simple. If this is the way God speaks back when we whine for clarity or a break, it’s certainly the most practical, and least romantic, advice he could give. Go on a run. Clear your head. So I go.

Now as I repeat the most fundamental movement, a cycle of knees up and heels rolling over asphalt, I think about the idea of simplicity. I heard someone wise say simplicity is choosing contentment where we are, not where we have been or where we will be or even by our availability of options. I think about all the stuff that crowds me, much being a byproduct of school but some just existing universally. How I wish I could be perpetually restful and carefree and solitary, but oh man, I have so much to learn. Whatever state I am in is almost always based off my options.

I think about a favorite quote of mine by Camus. “In the depths of winter, I finally learned there lay within me an invincible summer.” Invincible. How fitting today. Slowly I am learning that contentment, our summer within, is indeed invincible. While I have been somewhere {California} and am going elsewhere {ha – Lord knows where that will be}, for now I am jogging down a grey road in Massachusetts. And the hunks of snow that hang from pine needles and suspend from frosted trees are things of beauty as much as anything.