This little bit of writing may pre-date Chandler Bing by a few years, but could it BE anymore dramatic (especially my Use of Capital Letters)? What can I say – I’ve always been, erm, highly in touch with my emotions.
I drafted this while away at college for the first time. I spent my freshman year at Ripon College in Wisconsin, eight hours away from my home. As I struggled with some of the adjustments we all face moving from teenage-hood to adulthood, I started walking around the streets of Ripon to clear my head. This, apparently, was one day’s result:
A Winter’s Walk
I went soul-searching today, and found what I had lost. Unto the world I may be trivial, but that makes my problems mere trivialities. I may have no impact on the world but the world has an impact on me, and that is why I’m alive. That is why I LIVE.
Walking across endless fields of decaying corn standing withered but facing the wind proudly, I breathe in the scent of nature. The finger cracks in the black of the street reach out, beckon, lure…The glory of the magnificent sky blue overhead with streaks of white weaving across it in asymmetrical symmetry draws my eyes upward.
A tiny plane floats above, breaking the purity of the heights, and I wonder with quiet apathy where it is flying and who is on it and what kind of lives do they live? My eyes drift downward and my mind falls on a house. It is a box, an enclosing, encroaching structure, but in its own way beauty, too, for behind the window lurks a heart. The houses come alive, begging me to admire them in their cold facades. But here a flower drawn by childish hands hangs in the window and the paint on the pane is chipping off. The houses are not perfect either in their detached loneliness.
The street fingers lead me on, my closed mind opening up to the signs of life around me, and what life there is! How Wonderful it is to be Alive Today! Hand in hand with the icicle stream, the barren trees twisting their mystical lore around me I walk on and silent nature speaks through the rustling of the rushes, the distant chuckling of the winter water, the whistling of the boughs over me. I breathe in air, new air, filling me with inner peace, serenity, insight into myself. Today I went soul-searching and Found what I had Lost.