9 Lives

I was thinking about it last week, and I figured that I have lived four separate lives/realities in 2013. From January to April, I was an ambitious undergraduate psychological researcher with the discipline to stay in on weekends (despite being 21) and the fortitude to compose a thesis while everyone else seemed to be shooting the breeze. Then I turned in my thesis, and from mid-April to June, I was the young and vivacious college senior who had little care and concern for any fruitful ventures, because my post-grad career had been "figured out" and all duties had been fulfilled- for a time.

From mid-June to the start of August, I was a wide-eyed graduate student, teacher-in-training with no context for understanding what I would be getting myself into from mid-August to now. And now, here I am— still young, still vivacious, still wide-eyed but with more experiences under my belt (at least 4 months' worth), more context, more duties, little to no frozen yogurt meals, and a schedule where very little concerns me or is solely about me.

This shift in roles has brought with it a major paradigm shift. It has me sitting in my living room at home in South Bend, IN where I have written many a piece of writing but feeling and thinking very differently about the world as I know it now in comparison to the world as I knew it last January or April. With every new set of experiences, it feels as though there is a new life, a new world, a new paradigm being discovered. The 4 past "me's" have come with their individual challenges and successes, roles and responsibilities. The ones coming up no doubt will also bring with them the same. These periods in life or, as I grew up calling them in church, "seasons" are God's way of growing and changing us. And I feel that in every season I have grown, sometimes (seemingly) more substantially than others, but certainly, change has been made— spiritually, academically, professionally, socially, economically, emotionally... and in the words of Sam Cooke, "...I know a change gon' come."