There are days when I count the minutes. There are days when all I can think about is the future that I believe awaits me on the other end of things. I think up every scenario of my plane ride home. I see my tears, I hear my music, I see the hugs, I see the sighs, I feel my nerves already. What it will be like walking down that aisle traveling home, what I will do when I see my old friends, who will I be after 5 months of time spent in a 3rd world country with nobody familiar to me but my own thoughts? I wonder if I will feel the solitude that so often separates one from another after months of separate experiences, I wonder if God will travel with me there, to those places.
I find myself thinking in future mode when I feel alone, when I feel afraid, when I feel weak. It seems controllable, it seems like it sits in the palm of my hand, like I could somehow teleport myself to that place and cease to feel in the present. But, today, I didn’t feel that way. I felt ready to face the present moment, I felt like time was so out of my hands that it was free to be and to pass as it wished. It felt like a person I was well acquainted with, like it was for me and not against me. Anyone that faces an extended period of time away from the comforts and the familiars of home has most likely experienced this same type of conflicted feeling over the passage of time. In some ways, it passes so quickly I don’t even have a chance to know it. In other ways, I feel like I am living a new life that will never end here, like my entire past got wiped off by a few months, never to come back to me.
As I walked the dusty streets and breathed the smoke-filled air and carried my sack of shampoo and water bottles home from the store, I asked myself: “Why and when do I specifically experience these moments of freedom? What is it about this point in solitude that makes me feel somehow more alive and yet, less human?” There’s something divine about that place, it is free. Like Rainer Maria Rilke says in his “Letters to a Young Poet,” I believe it has something to do with a deep and profound trust of what difficulties lie ahead. Future thinking gives us the illusory idea that we can control. We cease to operate in faith because we don’t feel any need to. And yet, time might be the only thing we absolutely have no control over. It passes quickly and then it passes slowly and we have no way of speeding it up or slowing it down. But, might I just trust that life happens right? Might I just trust enough to let go of my grasp of the future, the future that I have made up in my own mind?
In the remaining two months I live here, I hope I can break out of this very human way of thinking, that somehow I might be able to break out and really live as one set free from time, from anything that tries to set a boundary in places that should be limitless. In trying to control time, I allow time to control me. I want to think of time as segments of growth, love, rightness, and realization. I don’t want to be hemmed in to the very human way of thinking in days and hours and minutes for didn’t we just create all that just to give ourselves some form of structure? I want to think like Jesus thinks with Kingdom thoughts. I want to use my moments of fear as opportunities to open the doors of my soul and let trust in, let God do His work in that moment, let His love destroy the fear that so often accompanies the inevitable human solitude.
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