Anxiety and Relief

Things don’t look so good for My Chem right now. Though they powered through Bamboozle, it wiped them out and they canceled Portland today. Next up is Tuesday’s show, so unless Monday will be ample recovery time, it looks like we’ll be stuck going Rudy’s, getting wasted and screaming “Helena” in four-part harmony (impressive, considering there are only three of us). That, or working on our papers. But it’s out of our hands. All we can do is hope and wait.

Forgive me for sounding like a self-parody, but I was running in the cemetery this morning (told you), and the most beautiful thing happened. It was rather overcast, and I was running up the path when the sun came out from behind a cloud and painted all the headstones white. The pink and newly green trees glowed. Then, from behind me, a dove with a worm in her mouth came flapping over my head into the tree where presumably her babies were. Suddenly the place felt so alive. It. Was. Divine.

Running in the cemetery is great stress relief. For one, it’s simply one of the prettiest, quietest places on campus, but also, it is full of time. It makes you feel small and young and ephemeral, in the most satisfying, liberating way. All the stonecarved names had little worries like yours once, and now, the world has forgotten those anxieties. Nothing that seems pressing in your life actually matters, because before you know it, you too will be a stonecarved name. And every year for centuries, whitepink blossoms will blow over your bones, and every year green leaves, and then gold, and then snow. The world is breathing calmly all the while. And the names and bones remain, and the spring returns, and the little inconveniences evaporate. In the end they will not stay with you. So why pay attention to them now? Things like spring, like songs, like whitepink trees and sunbeams – those things are the true things, the eternal things. That’s what we go back to in the end. We'd all do well to claim them now.