Ideas that Shaped Me.

It is 12:30 am.  I took a 10 mg melatonin a few hours ago and I'm still awake.  Story of my life.

The current solution to this predicament is to down a bunch of Halloween candy.  The sugar rush should have an equally strong reverse effect, right?  Hopefully one that involves lots of good dreams before my alarm goes off at 7 am and the studying of physics resumes, a full day of torque, momentum, hydraulics.  What could be more exciting?

Oh right.  A lot of things.

As a seasoned insomniac, I'm starting to notice that most of the time, the things that keep me up are ideas that I should probably start writing down.  And since technically I am still living out the first day of November, and everyone seems to be assembling thankfulness lists, I feel a need to write about being thankful for ideas that were passed onto me, shaping much of who I am today.

One of those ideas was from my mom, who told me to start writing in a journal one night when I was  in elementary school and couldn't sleep.  That suggestion became not just a discipline, but a salvation.  Those pages of words, capturing feelings throughout middle school, high school, college, and now into adulthood, were often the only blank spaces that gave me room to really be me.  When I couldn't find words, I could write until I found them.  Or didn't find them, but still found a sense of surrender, a restoration of wonder and balance and compassion for myself and others.  When struggling with deep anxiety, depression and just a general sense of being different from my peers when I was younger, there was a solace and a friendship in words, as well as in the stories of writers who inspire me to this day.

The other idea was my dad's idea to go to Nicaragua when I was just 12 years old.  That trip would end up being, without me realizing it at the time, one of  the most pivotal experiences of my youth.  That land got into my heart in a way that no other place has, and I've been to quite a few places.  There are days I still get transported back there through my senses connecting a smell, a taste, a sound, a feeling to a memory.   Going to other nations is an amazing gift, but going to one that is considered one of the poorest in the modern world will wreck a young heart.  You don't see the things my young eyes saw and not come back with questions of how your life can create more light.  How your life can become a prayer that answers a deep need.  And even more importantly, an understanding developed in my heart about how even in economic poverty, there are those who live with deep joy.  A joy from which I can learn.  Even with all my needs met, my heart too often lives in poverty and want, disconnected from the embrace of the Father and true, deep, abiding love.