Well Hello

Whoo! Second post... how many months later? Yeah...

Anyway... I know... I'm bad at this.

Tonight I was just kind of sitting alone in my room listening to Lights (seriously, if you haven't heard of her or her music, check her out) and was just kind of thinking about stuff that is going on in my life right now. No, I won't give you completely specific details because, frankly, I don't care to nor would you care to read them. But at the moment there are some huge life changes going on all at once and it can be hard for me not to be overwhelmed by all of it. Maybe overwhelmed isn't a strong enough word. I'll be honest: it all terrifies me. And then a couple of Lights’ songs came on, one by the title of "Face Up" and the other by "Lions!". To give you an idea of what these songs are about since not everyone will be at all familiar with them: Face Up’s chorus says "…The way you feel is something everybody goes through/ Dark out, but you still gotta light up/ You need to wake up/ Gotta keep your face up". Now Lions! is actually written about World of Warcraft, but it is still applicable and some of my favourite lyrics say that "Lions make you brave/ Giants give you faith/ Death is a charade/ You don't have to feel safe to feel unafraid".

So, while I was listening to these songs I started to think, which admittedly can be interesting with the things that tend to run through my head. But I’ll let you have a snippet just this once.

A lot of things scare me. Clowns, for example, make me quite nervous. Geese terrify me. But I have never felt the apprehension about a situation that I do about the one(s) coming up. Why is that? Going to a new place can be hard (one of the things that will be happening to me soon), but I am certainly not the first one to do so. People do it every day for various reasons.

“The way you feel is something everybody goes through”. Fear is a very common emotion and one that many people let take over entire situations and how they react to different circumstances. Yes, there are some things that should be feared, but most fear is unjustified. My fear I would categorize as such. I have no real reason to be afraid of going somewhere new. I can still easily stay in touch with people I am leaving and it is very easy to make a trip back. There is no reason to be afraid of any of it.

“Gotta keep your face up”. Sometimes we need to push through uncomfortable situations and keep a positive outlook on it. We are put in the positions that we are in for a reason. If God didn’t want it to be a certain way, it wouldn’t be. So sometimes we all just need to learn to ‘go with the flow’ and rise up against the fear that we all feel. Every circumstance that we go through helps us learn and grow stronger as a person. We shouldn’t look at them with dread; we should look at them with anticipation about what we will learn about ourselves and how it will help shape our lives.

Now for my favourite part. “You don’t have to feel safe to feel unafraid”. This, for me, is the lyric that I can identify the most with. I may not feel comfortable with what I may encounter, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be fearless and take on life head on. I will be putting myself way out of my comfort zone (feeling slightly unsafe) in the near future. I can look at it in different ways. I can be afraid of it and try to avoid it as much as possible or I can be brave about it and make the most of it. Many people choose the former, which is a shame.

Bravery, I believe, is a part of someone’s character- but it can also be shaped and made more evident in somebody. We are all brave in some way. Some may show it differently than others. But no matter what situation one is going through, there will always be someone that has gone through it before and has come out a better person for it. You don’t have to be OK with that particular situation, but that shouldn’t keep you from being bold about who you are and what you will do about it [the situation].

So, this post may have been more to my benefit than yours. It was simply me thinking through things on paper (well, actually a computer screen). I apologize if much of it didn’t make any sense or felt it was chopped. It wasn’t meant to be a perfect blog post. It was just something that was on my mind that I needed to get out. If anyone has any comments, agreements, disagreements, etc, feel free to leave them.

Next post shouldn’t be so long in coming and it will probably be more put together. But until then- keep an open mind and don’t take everything at face value.