The Dig

It's so bright out before I start digging that, at first, I always try to avoid it. The world is a world of distraction for she who desires to avoid her work. But it's inevitable; it's necessary. So I begin to dig, a discouraging number of blind hacks into the Rock of Pages until I finally catch a glimpse of a tiny glimmer—hope. So I dig faster, this time with more precision. I accidentally slip and my pick lands in an unexpected chapter. A shimmer of a different colour. What luck! I widen the circumference of my tunnel. As I get deeper and deeper into the rock, an array of hidden gems become known to me. I've become obsessive in my digging. The brightness that I left behind me long ago without noticing could not compare with the shimmering jewels now illuminating my mind. I can't stop. The desire for more pulses through my entire body. I feel like I'm going to explode. The ring of my pick pounds in my head nearly drowning out the unfortunate announcement: Ten minutes until the library closes.

Is research like this for everybody?

So....I have this tendency to overdramatize everything. Sometimes this plays out in my actual behavior and activities (i.e. I dance alone in abandoned fields, travel to Ireland and make an Irish couple fall in love with me, perform with my British a cappella group in Scotland and Germany, convince my apartment mates to go cliff jumping or swimming in our underwear in the ocean at midnight, etc) but sometimes my life is relatively normal so I have to overdramatize it in the way I understand it and communicate it. It's true, that opening paragraph is merely my reflection on a long night researching in the library, but you know what? It really was as cool as that paragraph makes it sound.

I'm in this really neat place at school right now where everything I'm learning and writing (or at least the things I'm dedicating most of my time to) is going towards what I want to do with my life after I graduate ["What? You've figured out what you want to do with your life?" you ask. Why yes, I have. And I'd love to chat with you about it if you want to hear more]. I'm combining all that love of learning that I've had since I was pretty little with the passion of understanding that I'm finally going to be doing something about it. I won't just have a collection of pretty facts and ideas when I'm done with this. I'll have a quiver full of arrows that will be useful as I head into battle (please excuse my excessive use of unrelated metaphors tonight. Sometimes I just think that metaphors are the only ways to get a hold of the strange plethora of worms wiggling around in my head.......ew).

Well, anyhow, I think this is going to be a short post tonight. I liked the digging metaphor that came to me while I was being sucked into the tunnel of my book at the library so I thought I'd share. Especially since I have this horrible tendency to think that I'm only supposed to write blog posts when cool stuff happens to me. Blog posts are snap shots of the thoughts and ideas and activities that constitute my life, right? And put simply, nobody takes a snap shot of a girl in an oversized college hoodie, wide-eyed and gaping at a boring-looking paperback book sitting at a little cubby in a run-of-the-mill reference room. But, you know what? Maybe they should. Because maybe it's those moments that make life feel worth-living. Maybe it's in those seemingly unglamorous moments that your life changes and your heart explodes with feelings that seep into your entire body and remind you that you're alive. Maybe every once in a while we need to put down the instagram filter and let those moments of deep experience colour themselves. Maybe, just maybe, that's what makes something #Beautiful