temporum

The scholastic year is now drawing to a close, and I'm just now realizing some very valuable things that perhaps have been growing within my mind all throughout the year and are just now blossoming into the maturity that only experience can bring.

The first of these was made known to me around the end of last semester.  Isn't that nice, how your own thoughts can make themselves known to you?  They've been hiding and waiting for a good opportunity to present themselves all this time...because they know that timing is everything.

See, I was reflecting on some of the books that I had "read" throughout middle school and high school and wondered why I now found myself going to the library and checking out classic literature, something that I never imagined myself doing when I was younger and struggling through Animal Farm.  Clearly, there is something wonderful about this literature that I completely ignored or missed when I was younger.

Perhaps some of it had to do with being 'forced' to read the book. When you're in the middle of your cherished teenage years and someone says "read Farenheit 451. It's about questioning authority," there's something inside of you that is like "Oh yeah?  Why should I read your dumb book?  What if I have better things to do? What if I just don't want to? Huh?" And that mindset kindof taints the reading experience.

Perhaps some of it had to be with being in eighth grade and understanding that Animal Farm was an allegory about some sort of tyrannical situation, but being 13 or 14 years old and having no idea who Trotsky is and only being able to compare everything bad to Hitler...you'd be frustrated at not getting the allegory.

Perhaps some of it had to do with not experiencing enough of the world yet to understand what was going on.  Racism was something we'd only read about; grief was something we'd never quite touched; love was something we could only abuse.

With this realization, I decided that I ought to reread some of the books I didn't ingest fully the first time around.  This is, of course, easier said than done because there are all sorts of books out there begging to be read for the first time, and you want to take the time to reread something you didn't like the first time around?  Silly, silly...

So I haven't made it back to any books yet, but I've thought more about timing and life events, and I realized that perhaps if I had learned to play the piano at a different time, I'd have learned to love it and become proficient.  I could learn to play all sorts of beautiful music that I hadn't known existed until recently...

Perhaps if I had fallen in love with soccer earlier, I could have turned that into much more than a recreational passion.

There are all sorts of what-if questions in regard to timing.  But my wise seventh grade teacher told me at the beginning of the year that contrary to popular belief, there is a such thing as a stupid question, and most often those stupid questions start with "what if".

So don't get bogged down in stupid questions.  I've found that things move in and out of my life with immaculate timing to make me the person I am and keep me on track to the person I'm becoming. If something doesn't work out the first time, that doesn't mean it isn't meant to be, it just means it's not the right time.

And just for the record, I'm not the only person to have this sentiment.

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven"
-Ecclesiastes 3:1