light gives heat

the Green River, today

I was reading The unbearable lightness of being before bed last night, and right before I woke up this morning I was dreaming about repressed designers who worked in a steel mill and never really wanted to be at office parties and were really stressed about when to go to sleep because they had a lot of work to do. The designers and steel mill and office parties were all Kundera's. (I hope.) The stress about scheduling was not.

For most of spring break I'd been fairly content about how I'd been using my time; the masses of course reading that I'd intended to do was largely undone, but that was fine since I was doing a lot of other things that I had to get done. And I was taking a delightful break from my 7am alarm.

I think my sense of pace inhabits a sliding scale with
   soo much work okay the way to get the most out of your time is to plan everything carefully and make sure you get everything done according to plan, okay? okay?
on one end of the spectrum and
   you are called to be still, to immerse yourself in the immediate, to revel and to trust
on the other.

Going into spring break I'd been closer to the compulsive pole, hence ridiculous to-do list; and most of spring break I'd drifted around the other end, hence, city jaunts and lots of sleep and contentment with slow work; but then thinking about the reality of leaving Williamstown in two months (sharpened by the the purchase of a plane ticket home for the evening of commencement) slid me closer to the silly end again. So silly that, even though I'm on my weekly homework-sabbath now, I almost canceled on a museum date with one of my friends.

Parenthetically, the college art museum is one of the many resources that I'll miss keenly -- I'm still weirded out by the breadth and richness of the collection and, especially after this year's thorough reinstallation, the curatorial sensitivity. One thing that I really loved this time was a placard discussing the messy ethics behind the acquisition of these two amazing 800BC Assyrian reliefs that were procured for the college by a missionary alum. o_O

Anyway. I know indubitably that the best way to do these last two months is brief judicious contemplation of both the bucket list and consulting the Boss sorts, followed by living unqualified by enumeration or worry. Wow, no idea why I decided to sound so pretentious there. Basically I need to steer clear of the panic path, and stick to the reckless appreciation path instead.

Of course, the other problem is that I fail to recall which path this blog post was meant to be on. Hmm.

The other thing I remember wanting to note down (verbs/word = 1/3 ugh) was a snippet from my bible study passage for today. Eight (!!!) (not panic, don't worry, just amazement) years ago, when I first left home for Singapore, one of the other Malaysian girls, who has become one of my closest friends, told me that one of our older mutual friends had offered her Daniel & co's exile/training in Babylon to our Singapore education. (If you parsed that sentence on the first read, you win a hypothetical prize, and I will desist from parentheses.)

Four years later, when I wrestling with the idea of trying for Singapore government scholarships that offered generous funding for U.S. or U.K. university education but required awardees to assume permanent residency in Singapore, I held back because of a certainty that, for me, those scholarships were the king's table, sumptuous and prestigious but not best.

Not that I think the Singaporean government is an evil taint on humanity or anything, ahaha, but God had something different in mind. So it's sort of neat that, after another four-year interval, the bible study material that I started working through at the beginning of my freshman year has brought me back to Daniel. Just like we've finally come back to the topic sentence from two paragraphs ago. So:

Finally these men said, “We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to do with the law of his God.” [Daniel 6:5]

(See, those were square brackets.) (Ah darn.)

My initial thought was how cool it would be if that verse could be applied to my lifestyle, with the appropriate pro/noun modifications, of course. But as much as people generally seem to consider me a nice person or whatever, there are fifty million different charges that could be brought against me, and far more that I could bring against myself, e.g. exaggerating with little respect for numbers. Often I'm not even sure if I'd want a statement like that to be made about me -- I'm still a bit squeamish about putting hardcore Christian-y things up on this blog or Facebook -- I'm not sure if I dare to claim Christ as my defining identification. But I'm utterly sure that nothing else could be best.

And I'm unsure if that's how I want to end this blog post, but I'm pretty sure that there are worse ways.