Bad video, good brownies

In seventh grade I had to make a video presentation about an event in the 90’s. I chose Princess Diana’s death. I got so into this video, too. I researched her life for hours, found the best photos, and put Candle in the Wind as the soundtrack. This was going to be the most moving and life-changing thing ever. I wanted my class to get as into it as I was, so I put *all* my research notes in tiny scrolling captions along the bottom of the video. As a result, no one could read anything and barely understood what my video was about––as my teacher tried to gently explain to me afterwards. When I understood what he was saying, I felt sadder than I had wanted people to feel from my video

This was my harsh introduction to the power of editing.

It’s a hard thing to understand, that there is such a thing as “too much of a good thing.”

I want my life to be exciting and ridiculous and full, even if it’s risky or difficult. But this doesn’t have to be true of every moment, or even every day. It can’t be.

Studying abroad is, by nature, a short-term situation. It is a short-term situation in a place that you may not get back to for years, and that is most likely one of the more interesting places on the planet (or more importantly a cheap plane-ride away from a dozen other interesting places). And so you feel the pressure from the peers that you left behind, your family, and yourself, to make the absolute most of it. If today wasn’t spectacular and life-changing, then what the heck are you doing?

I’m aware of this pressure, but it’s hard for me to not internalize it because of the way I’m wired; I’m the type of person who will need a lot of convincing to *not* sight-see during a few-hours layover in Paris.

And I think there’s value in that mindset too, but you just have to be able to recognize when it’s needed and when it’s silly. And this is hard because, the reality is, the world is just a little too cool.

But to feel like we have to be living life to the fullest everyday, all the time, is exhausting and discouraging.

It’s exhausting because what we have in our lap, from our present situation, is never enough to make every day meet our standards of *amazing*. And so we have to work extra hard to go find other elements to add to our life to make it more exciting. This experience-hoarding has masqueraded in my life as busyness or “adventures.” And it’s discouraging because each new experience will never be enough.

In high school I did ten-million activities because I wanted to and could (kind of) pull it off while still having a social life and getting into college.

First semester of college I tried this and fell flat on my face, recovered from it second semester, and came back thriving during sophomore year––down to only three extracurriculars. So I had a little more room for breathing and for other humans, but in hindsight I really could have used more.

And I was able to work more hours too, which allowed me to add some more chaos to the mix by using my work-study paychecks to buy bus tickets to New York a few times. These three weekends stand out in my memory because I had the best travel buddies, I realized some mini-dreams of mine, and Manhattan really is just a magical place (because Jimmy Fallon, Broadway, and bagels live there).

I would have gone every weekend if I could. I live for these moments, these memorable scenes, and I try to recreate them at all costs. But I think I’m wrong.

I love this quote by Donald Miller in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: “What memorable scenes do is punctuate the existing rise and fall of a narrative.” It’s easy to think that memorable scenes are what make our life meaningful when really they just help us to recognize where we are in the bigger story.

And experience-hoarding can be so destructive simply because it seems like a solid life-philosophy on the surface. Each adrenaline-filled moment on its own may seem good and beautiful because it made us feel something. But then you step back one day, exhausted, to see that what you were making makes no sense; there was no common thread, just a story jam-packed with a bunch of climactic scenes.

We are sacrificing something far more beautiful in the long-term when we get distracted by getting the immediately spectacular.

I let this past summer (willingly and unwillingly) become a season with a much higher ratio of chill reflecting time than typical exciting vacation stories. And I am so thankful it was not the other way around. Instead of many crazy adventures, I had one, absolutely insane road-trip to California to apply for my Spanish visa.

In hindsight I’m not sure how it was even possible to fit so much genuine, meaningful good into one week: family, friends, beach, more family, 2am delirious empty freeway driving, traffic-sing-alongs, the good kind of exhaustion: from people-ing too hard and from Disneyland, the spontaneous “why the heck not” moments, goood food, and everything in between. I could not have scripted it. And it was all beautiful––traffic and hangry-ness included.

But I know for certain that it wouldn’t have been beautiful had I not had the seemingly duller months surrounding it. And it wasn’t only the contrast from daily, summer-camp-working life that made it so. It was because I had time to be and room to grow in the surrounding moments. By the grace of God the right balance was struck in this season between go-time and not-go-time, and it made a really good thing.

I think our soul wants to go this way if we let it. But we like to fight it and settle for something less than a masterpiece.

Anything that is created, and is a success, has good balance and good timing: comedy, a great movie, a good meal, a famous symphony.

Think about what happens when someone slacks in the creative or editing process, though. Like imagine if Lin-Manuel Miranda had just tried to put music to the entire text of that Alexander Hamilton biography he read on vacation. I’m not sure what that would even be like, but it would be something other than a Broadway hit.

One of the hardest things for me to understand (in my puny two decades on the planet) has been that in order to have this cool, good life, I don’t have to live it to the max in every moment, just in general. And often the moments that punctuate its goodness are the ones that take the longest to come around.

Imagine you are making brownies, you give up 10 minutes in, serve your friends scolding hot batter, and call it a day. Not the best choice. But a lot of times we do this with our lives. We get impatient and take short-cuts. Or we want to mask the fact that we are using spelt flour in the batter and throw in a few extra spoonfuls of agave syrup to make it taste better. But it never works.

No matter how hard we try to fake it, in the end the art critics of our lives can always sniff out a phony. A masterpiece needs its basic foundation and its spectacular details, a lengthy creation process and a perfect deadline.

I’m starting to think that it’s the moments between the wild and memorable scenes that give meaning to them. It’s the elements that make them part of a whole that make them beautiful.

So the fun adventures I have this semester will be memorable, yes, but I won’t avoid sitting in the less obvious, harder, mundane moments the weeks in-between, because I know they are the ones that will shape me in the long-term. Anyways, there are plenty of adorable neighborhoods to Instagram in this city and there is definitely plenty of language to still learn. (and also I have work to do because *study* abroad does not equal easy-breezy-siesta-life)