It'll be Alright.

Sometimes I think of the idea of moving on with a season in life, any season really, and I’m solaced by the idea, “Even if I leave wherever I am, I take with me the experiences I’ve had, and the person I’ve been.”  But I ruminate on the thought now: what if it all seems like a dream?

I always count myself blessed even to have the challenges I do because I know they birth good character and perseverance among other things.  I always imagine I’ll benefit from any hardship because I’ll keep it with me; I’ve experienced it, it’s mine.  But reading something from someone lately, they mention about a moment in their life after a season where it felt like they were in a dream afterwards.  

My thought isn’t as much as theirs, in feeling like they were in a dream, but what if one feels like they woke up from a dream?  In transitioning from one vastly different lifestyle into another, I can imagine how a quick and concrete transition can make it seem like the previous period never even happened.  Can this to some degree expunge some of the experience the person gained from that season?  If someone learns to live in poverty, but switches mode quickly back to access to affluence, will they forget the things they learned as positives even in lieu of poverty, simply for the ability to re-settle into what they were used to, seemingly not experiencing the things which once changed them?  I had never thought of that until now, in this context.  If I left my missions work in the Tenderloin, and perhaps opted for a college education, upon grabbing the college scene’s lifestyle, would I perhaps nullify to some degree everything I learned in my not-so-typical 22 year old season of now?  

So I have deliberated, that if it be the case, that if the things I learn now, if even only through deep trial and hardship, would leave me as if a fleeting dream perhaps, let the trials of life cut me deep and wide, so I might never forget the things which I prosper through.  Let me be so wrought, that I never may wake from a dream, but that every day’s trials would ingrain themselves in me, keeping the true, if even sometimes visceral, reality of life ever fresh in my mind.