Take Hold (Or, How I Want To Be There In My City)

Later this year, I will get married on a golf course on the other side of the country.

I keep coming back to that statement because it’s a really hilarious one to me. It’s one I’m very excited about to say the least. But hilarious because golf has no significance to myself or my fiancé, it’s just a really good spot where her parents live that is pretty and we have access to. It’ll be a simple service. We’ve planned it as such. Simple and purposeful. We’ve tried to be that in our relationship. We’ve tried to take hold of the absurdity. We’ve tried to take hold of the opportunity every day to be purposeful for each other.

There was a moment in an airplane earlier this year where Atlanta seemed to stretch on forever. I really do think we were in the sky for over an hour and we were still above city lights. I’m sure what I was actually seeing at that point was somewhere in Alabama but after a day of flying from Seattle at 4:00am to Atlanta and then back west a time zone, everything was just blurring together.

People leave my hometown because there’s no opportunity. Seeing all those city lights stretching for miles and miles, you could tell that opportunity was everywhere you looked. Being in Seattle for a few weeks visiting people who moved there for opportunity stuck with me. Maybe there isn’t any opportunity where I live. Maybe my time is wasted living here. Maybe I’m supposed to take hold of what little time I have in this life by spending it elsewhere.

Or perhaps the opportunity lies in building a future where those opportunities are there in my city. There’s honor in that for sure. And I was made to create, which sounds like a really pretentious statement for some reason even though at this point in my life I can finally admit it. I fought it for years, but when I’m bored, I create. When office life wasn’t fulfilling years ago, I started this blog. It was born out of the desire to take hold of the absurdity of life. When I landed a good job that fits my strengths, I tacked on countless side projects and YouTube experiments. So it sounds melodramatic, sure, but I can’t run from the truth anymore. Creating is what I do when I’m not in the middle of doing anything else. And when I’m not around the tools I typically use to create, I always have my notebook on hand, ready to scratch down any ideas that pop up. Take hold of the ideas before they flee.

2017 isn’t as fresh and new at this point. We’re in the thick of things, with a new President and new arguments and new negativity that is truthfully just the same negativity we’ve had for thousands of years reborn in a new format on a new forum. But what about opportunity? Isn’t there also on the flipside of the insanity a chance to create something new?

Every 24 hours, the sun rises. For as long as human history has been recorded, we’ve viewed this sunrise as something new. Everything that happened 24 hours ago is old. As soon as the sun rises, what happened 24 hours ago is washed away. Everything is made new. In the Christian faith, rebirth and the process of things being made new is a central concept. Who is to say that the influence of that can’t be felt on a daily basis?

Who is to say that everything can’t be new every day and everywhere we make our homes? Surely opportunity isn’t limited to where the street lights stretch, but rather as far as the light stretches with each and ever sunrise.

Take hold.