How Beautiful life is
To steal a quote from one of my favourite people
And we stood atop the last of the peaks of the Rocky Mountains and thought "how beautiful life is!"
To appreciate what one has, it must be looked at from all angles. The future isn’t as daunting when you have previous experiences to learn from. My past shows that I have moved across the world plenty of times before, but this future is still scary. I had to ask myself why, if I’ve done this before, is it still so scary. I suppose the answer is that although the locations I’m visiting are all the same, my reasons for going back are now unknown. For the first time in my adult life I don’t have the job security which I had naively assumed was a factor in purchasing such an expensive education for myself. Every situation has a multitude of factors to consider; my main worry now is the prospects of employment and their proximity to my life. My life, which I carry with me in my being, is scattered across the globe. I packed up my material life and carried it across the Atlantic courtesy of United airlines excess baggage fees, but my emotional life is now torn apart and left hanging, unsure where to fall.
finality of my time in Boulder was heralded by a couple days where I was determined to embrace as many people as possible. The difference between seeing someone and embracing them comes not from physical proximity, but from intelligent inquiry. I had an enlightening conversation with Blake at one time where he said the simple act of asking ‘how are you?’ is how he defines his friendships. Although my mentality is that care need not to be as explicitly expressed, it still needs to be there.
I raced cyclocross out on the plains in the fading sunshine with Christa shouting at me to go faster, and then we drove back to the foot of the mountains with the sun disappearing behind the flatirons. We played loud and happy music with an immense sadness inside. We smiled and laughed and took seconds to answer each other as every word and memory was stored and filed; meticulously tagged so it wouldn’t simply float away in the conveyer belt of cognizance.
We hiked a mountain. Not a big one, but a Boulder one. We assembled at NCAR and talked the talk that only happens when one doesn’t have to worry about their appearance over the coffee table. There is something about the preoccupation of walking that makes conversation flow endlessly without break, or the worry that entirely tangential switches of topic would be frowned upon.
With exercise acomplished, the next step was to celebrate with finely brewed liquids. The Reubens gathering of a Monday evening has been a fixture in my Boulder life. Never formal; sometimes a text message would be sent advertising the fact, and other times a couple people would walk in without the merest suggestion that anything would be happening. Either way, furniture would invariably be rearranged, and the wait-staff would smile through clenched teeth as we treated the place as if we owned it. On this particular Monday, I hadn’t advertised it particularly widely for the fact that I didn’t want thirty people to arrive. We had a turn out of twenty instead. We ate and made merry. Very merry.
Life is beautiful.
