I wasn’t looking forward to this summer.
I had been living on campus all year. As soon as finals wrapped up, I spent days consumed with my only task being to carefully dismantle the daily life that I had built up. Every funny post-it note my roommates had stuck to our wall; every Cheez-it box, beat up school notebook, and half-used bottle of dish detergent. I filled my car until I could barely see through the rear mirror, and then I drove home to where my stuffy and untouched bedroom was waiting for me.
I like my bedroom. I like being at home. But after a long semester filled with exciting highs and lows, the idea of being home with three months of low-key time ahead of me felt astonishingly neutral. I spent a lot of those first few days at home thinking either about the semester that had just passed or all the things I wanted to do in the one ahead.
As of a week or so ago, I am halfway through the summer I was dreading. I’m sandwiched in a transitional period not only between my sophomore and junior year of college, but also a viral infection that is awkwardly establishing itself as a permanent fixture in society, a chaotic cluster of various government and world issues that have yet to reach closure, and a period in my life where i’m trying to be better in every possible way but haven’t quite made it there yet.
Being caught in the middle is frustrating. I want to fast forward to that movie I’m going to see this weekend, or to that fall semester with new and exciting challenges, or to the day when I finally have it all figured out (which realistically is not a singular day that will ever come). Like with a book, I want to know how it all ends. But we’re not there yet.
Where I am is at my grandparents house spending time with family in the midst of a handful of personal deadlines and worries. More specifically, I’m sitting on the back porch with my dog and drinking up the last little bit of cool morning air before it becomes sweltering outside.
I think the phrase “living in the moment” is cliche, but not illegitimate. Sometimes it feels like an idealized concept, implying that the moment is a good one, when sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s a stressful tear-filled late night doing schoolwork, or the agonizing drive back from campus, or an uneventful morning in the middle of July when the day hasn’t quite begun yet.
It may not be an exciting day or even a good one at all, but sometimes you look through your window during that terrible all-nighter and discover that the stars really do look bright that night, or you put on your favorite playlist during that commute, or you realize that sitting outside that morning is quite nice after all. In that moment, it matters a lot less that you’re wedged in this weird space between all the things you’ve done and all the things you want to do, or that you aren’t quite where you daydream of being right now, because this is your right-now. We exist in the in-between, so we might as well find something to like about it.
These have been just a few ‘right-nows’ from the past few weeks. When I took just a quick break from thinking about everything else to appreciate the in-between. As it happens, once I started looking, the view was pretty good.
