1 Nephi 3:7

I'm taking a Book of Mormon Institute class this semester on campus that spans the beginning of the Book of Mormon to midway through Alma, if memory serves. We had a sub today, and having the creative licensing of a sub, he took the girl's devotional and made it the majority of the lesson. Ironically the verse that covered her devotional had been the majority of our lesson on Tuesday. So we covered the same ground two days in a row.

And I needed to hear it.

Nephi wrote his account some 30 years after the events took place. Both teachers kept stressing this point throughout the two different lessons, asking how the account would be different if Nephi didn't have that lens of hindsight to peer through. In the first verse of 1 Nephi 1, he says "having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days..." We were repeatedly asked how he could say those things together; afflictions and being "highly favored of the Lord." Would that have been acknowledged without the hindsight?

I've, in a way, become obsessed with the hindsight lately. I've often made practice of looking back at moments I didn't understand, seeing the merit behind the struggle. I'm having one such moment right as I type and...

I'm amazed, again and indefinitely, at the glory of God. I had a moment today in which, as far as I'm concerned, I acted not of myself but of the Lord's will for me. It was selfless and of really no benefit to myself, but my desire to act was overbearing. And now, my role completed, I feel at peace.

And I forget these moments. I forget the beauty in hearing that nudge from the spiritual realm that swims through our air, constantly bumping against us that we're often too preoccupied to feel. I forget the strength, courage, might that comes from acting on those impulses, following that guide in as small a manner as it could be, from talking to that person or elaborating in that text message to avoid confusion. I forget tender mercies.

I forget the thousands of pinpricks in my daily life that aren't "coincidence" or "nature" or "fate" or "happenstance" or "astrology," but truth and God-given blessings. I love not worrying; I love remembering these things and that I don't need to fret about all of it. I need to focus on doing my best in this moment, in following Him in word and deed, and good things are coming to me in due course of time.

And today I remembered I can be someone's good thing. I take part in the lives I cross.

I'm helping a friend with a play reading this week, and we discussed the script after our rehearsal Tuesday night, and someone mentioned the abnormal cast size, and how it's necessary to have those characters to move the plot, but to produce it would be cumbersome.

We star in our own shows, we're the protagonist of our plays, but we also moonlight as minor characters in the productions of others, moving their plot along, furthering their story. God has written an entire world's worth of stories, the most intricate novel of all time, the most elaborate play in the universe. And I get to be in it. Whether it's my story or another's, I get to cross the stage.

I need to remember to take the blocking from my Director when He gives it.

Throw Away Genius

Improv is teaching me a lot about life. For instance, the things I do or say don't matter after I've done or said them. It's become past action; it is of no benefit to beat myself up over how I could have done that better or responded differently to my fellow actor. I cannot fix it. The best I can do is acknowledge things could have been different and make a mental note for next time. To succeed in improv, to succeed in life, you have to pay attention to what's happening around you, you have to listen to your surroundings, and react as best you can in the minimal time you're allotted. No two situations will ever be the same. You can never fix what happens. The thing with scripted theatre is if I screw something up I can say "Next time," knowing that next time I have the ability to execute things in the effective way. Life and improv are unscripted. I can only count my losses and hope "next time" I'm more focused on what I need to do.

I hardly even know what this means.

"Grab your shovel." She said.

"Why?"

"We're going to need them when the rocks get deep."

After the rain when the grass gets slick and I wonder briefly how it'll react with my shoes, we trope into the trees with the shovels from the shed out back, nothing dry but our persons, the construction of the shed lending to frequent leaking. It starts again, it all starts up again. The digging and the groaning and general wondering why it is she drags me here, why it is we do this.

But we do. She hops over a mud puddle and shrieks through the trees. 

We do it. We do it all again.

"Grace." I mutter when she gets on hands and knees. Those stains from last rain still etched upon her clothes back at the house. She flashes back a smile, having forsaken the shovel, thrusting her hands into the dirt. I can feel the grit under my fingernails by watching her, ghost memories flinting past my eyes like gnats. It happened here.

"Grace." I say louder, watching her back muscles strain as she fanatically scoops the mud. "Grace!"

I realize I'm clutching my shovel; I look at it for a moment, the evergreen of the damp woods blurring into silence for a moment. I start up the trail past her, leaving her to toil with what's already been done.

It takes her a moment to catch me, her eyes still widened with that near maniacal gleam, confusion etched under the mud scaling her face. 

"We've done that one before." 

She watches me, follows me, her gaze calmed but still misunderstanding. 

"We've what?"

"We've done that one before!" I find myself frustrated at her as she stops short and slumps down. She looks at me, at my shovel, and sighs.

"Mine's still back there." Grace points with an unenergetic hand into the trees. 

Our eyes hold space for a long time, then hers start to flint down the hill. 

"We've done that one before."

"Can I go get it?"

"We've done that one before."

We're overlapping each other in speech, her eyes darting back the direction we've come with each alternate beat of her heart. She inches towards it.

"Just let me go get it."

"We've done that before, Grace."

"I'm just going to get it."

I wait a few hours, the sun's breached through the canopy, warming my body, drying my mud crusted grass stained shoes. I grab the old shovel and make a few attempts in the dirt at the base of the tree. We never get much progress, not when the ground dries, and not when she stays far behind. I weave back down through the trees, passing her in her digging, unaware that I'm there or that I know. It'll rain again, and she'll drag me out, but we won't make it too far. We never do. She likes where we've been more than where we're going. 

Even if all that's there is just dirt. 

It's a puzzle that's served us well.

When I was a kid I used to take all the puzzles out of the "game closet" next to our front door and spread them out on the floor of the front room (living room? family room? formal greeting room? Who knows what the "proper" name is). I'd put them in a large circle covering the majority of free floor space between our floral white couch and peach chairs. I'd dump the puzzles over, their pieces strewn in a pile, and once each puzzle was an empty slate I would begin.

Starting at the top of the circle I'd work my way clockwise, doing each puzzle as perfectly and quickly as I could. After making this common practice I began to pretend I was timing myself, and that this puzzle circle was my brainiac Olympics and I had to beat my personal best time. Eventually I added the more complex puzzles, telling myself once I got used to putting them together I could still hold record time.

Love is a puzzle depicting the sky. We each enter into life with our box of blue pieces, our quest being to find those whose pieces complete our picture. We stop and align our pieces with another, trying to make the puzzle work. But it's often hard to see how blue pieces fit without knowing if we're crafting the same picture. We spend an infinite amount of time trying one person's pieces only to discover those pieces that did fit don't build a picture; there are gaping holes or missing corners. Our sky is incomplete.

I'm sick of puzzles. I'm sick of waving my box about like a tin collecting alms, waiting for someone to think to try them out. I'm sick of finding matches that have more wrong than they do right, tired of extra pieces collecting dust in my box, through with packing up the puzzle again and moving around the circle to the next one.

I just want to finish it. I want to do what my grandparents have done and sit down, finish the puzzle, and glue it to a board to hang over the piano. I want to stop undergoing this task and behold it as art. I'm done with puzzles.

I read a few chapters in a book once that discussed an idea called 'flow.' It is, in essence, moments when a person is at the peak of their performance, whether that be music, sports, lecturing...when a person's task is so easily undertaken that it feels effortless, almost out of body, to be accomplishing it so perfectly with so little cognitive processing. The book also discussed how one cannot reach that peak, that flow, without stimulation. Practice. You're never going to have that perfect moment if you lie on the couch all day proclaiming boredom. As humans we're equipped to learn, to do. We're most satisfied in a bored state when doing something constructive: reading books or newspapers, cleaning, crafting. It's effort that leads us to achieving moments of excellence.

Won't I be more pleased when the puzzle finally works if I've been trying at it for so long? Won't it mean more to have worked endlessly for it?

Pop always says he prayed two years before he met Mom. Mom "dated" 64 guys before she met Dad.

Eight months and five guys down...

Here's to finishing the puzzle..

I'm closing the window, Peter.
I know I said I never would,
But it's becoming painfully clear
That the only thing an open window gets me
Is a draft.

Catch and Release

Good things come and pass.

I watched the stream flow by, my mind miles away, tossed in the gentle swirl of the current over rocks and minnows I used to pacify myself in catching.

They never let me keep the minnows, my parents. As dainty and petite a pet they made at time of capture, they were not meant to be captive long-term. I'd be obliged to return them to their life cycle, to grow and flow downstream to the lake and mate and eat and mate until death or a fisherman's rod brought them in.

But for two days they would be mine. For two days I'd keep them sustained in my empty juice bottle, adoring them and imagining what our future could be.

If our future could be.

Over and over I had to face that it couldn't, and release them back into the current.

It seems my life is nothing more than catch and release, catch and release, catch and release until I'm left crouched by the streamside wondering what point there is to it all. What waste of calorie to capture that which cannot stay, that which lives a better life without my grasp.

I was a fool to come again, I decided, leaning back on my haunches momentarily before shifting to Indian style, there on the bank. I was a fool to paint the illusion of reality along the trickle of the water swimming by. A fool to assume the minnows wanted me terrorizing them and restraining them from their allotted course, that somehow I was an exception to natural law. A fool to want what clearly cannot be mine.

For even though you say I'm worth it and worthwhile, I don't see you ushering me into an empty juice bottle.

I don't see you trying to keep me, when I want nothing more than to catch and keep you.