Light Up Ahead

Eventually, I want a summer where I can sit and read every single day. I say this; I think about it all the time, but I never follow through with it. Instead I putter through a few days of nothing to do, and then I propel myself into weeks packed with working as a camp counselor and then traveling to a foreign country for weeks as an English teacher. There is no real time for rest. There is no way of slowing myself down. There is only fast and faster in my life.

Being busy is a good thing. It keeps the mind from going idle. It focuses my attention on what I need to get done, and I seem to find more time to relax and write because I know I have to fit it into my schedule. I can't just channel surf my way through relaxation; instead, I have to be proactive about it.

The past week was one of the hardest of my life, so this week I am being proactive about writing and about reading. I'm going to enjoy this week I have for rest. I'm going to take advantage of it and enjoy it so that when I make the two-hour back to camp I am ready to pour out everything I have (and more) into the three sets of campers I will have.

And I'm not exactly sure how this summer will work. There are so many little things I'm worried over, little things I never thought through before signing up for the summer job or before applying for the teaching position. But I won't second-guess myself, at least not too much. Life is all about trusting your first instinct and trusting that everything will follow in a way that takes care of the small, daunting details. It's not about picking through all the options and having an anxiety attack over whether or not the correct option was selected.

Right now, it's pouring outside. The rain is falling down in a slant that almost makes the rain look as though it is falling sideways. The palm trees in my parent's backyard are moving about wildly, and watching the canal water blur as the rain hits it sends a calm through me. It's beautiful out here when it's sunny and when it's rainy. There aren't many places like that in the world, at least not like this, and being able to enjoy this moment, since I don't yet have to venture out in it, tells me I made the right choice. If I had stayed at school to work until leaving to teach, I would've missed this.