Plan A

Choose

                    The single clenched fist lifted and ready,

     Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.

               Choose:

     For we meet by one or the other.

 - Carl Sandburg

I was amazed to find that my recent rejection from grad school did not break my heart.  Quite the contrary, in fact – it thrilled me.  I say truthfully that I have never worked harder on any academic project.  I read books, wrote papers, perfected bibliographies, made friends, and even traveled to Oxford in December to get the lay of the land.  I was pretty sure I really wanted it. 

 

I think the celebration I feel in my soul is testament to the fact that no measure of genuine, hard work is ever wasted.  The direct goal of my efforts was not realized, but the indirect goal (or maybe these should be switched?) – to become a more educated and mindful person in the eyes of God – was.  I fell in love with my topic.  I got to read books about a subject I would have never explored otherwise.  I met people who showed me the sort of kindness that breaks your heart in the way it needs to be broken. 

 

The path is now completely uncertain, but instead of the crushing fear that used to suck hope and energy out of me, instead I see this as a premature opening of the starting gates.  There is something in the uncertainty that makes me deliciously angry.  I use that word because it’s a sensation that shares all the symptoms of anger – blood boiling, mind racing, at-the-ready, and when I go on my evening runs I cover twice the mileage and don’t even know it.  I feel bulletproof.  My imagination goes crazy with all the things I could go out and do with my life, and my muscles flood with adrenaline to beat down anything that will stand in my way.  But….

 

…in my way of what?

 

What’s the goal?  My spiritual side tells me that nothing of this world is of value because it is not eternal.  My human side tells me there are endless possibilities for what I can accomplish, people I can help, ways I can advance mankind.  My mind is able to find endless common ground between the two.  I am primed. 

 

I commonly use the rhetoric, “Coming up with a Plan B” when people ask me what I’ll do when my job ends in a couple of weeks.  I don’t think that’s true, though. 

 

This is Plan A. 

 

Humans have been making great journeys as long as history records.  Many of Western culture’s great foundational texts chronicle the epic voyages of heroes, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Odyssey, the book of Exodus in the Bible, Virgil’s Aeneid, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Hess’ Siddhartha, C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, and so many others.  One of the earliest of these articulates the fundamental question of the wanderer-seekers that followed: What does life mean?  And how should we live it?

 

All of this journeying, though, must be directed at finding something.  We seek so that we may find.  The point of the journey isn’t the journey as some say.  But the point of the journey is seldom the destination – the point of the journey is the thousand destinations we find accidentally along the way. 

 

When I look at the choices ahead of me, Sandburg’s words printed above describe the state of my hands – I can feel the weight of blood in my fingers, the strength of the muscles in my palms and forearms, the elastic readiness of the tendons in my joints.  The most difficult task of my days is to peel my tenacious fingers from the fist that grasps at air – to set it open, asking, “hand held out and waiting,” as motionless as a steel trap set open on a forest floor with springs and cables straining. 

 

As C. S. Lewis says, “I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He is sure it is good for him to wait.”