The State of Wow

There haven't been any outrageous changes since the last post. But what happened to me Thursday night before I went to sleep was a moment when I had to smile and say, out loud, "Wow." And if you haven't had a chance to read my last post, "The State of Whoops," then now may be a good time to visit it because not much in this post will make sense without it. It's funny how things can at least make a little more sense if you give them a chance to do so.

I guess you could say it all started with cleaning my desk yesterday morning. Or with a random book purchase a few years back. Or with high school football. Or, I suppose, with my birth. No matter how it's sliced, we end up here, so the beginning details don't matter a ton. The following thoughts will seem scattered, but they really do all tie together, so I'll number them to easier separate.

1) My favorite number has been 25 for awhile now. It was my number in high school football, mainly because my previously favorite number, 24, wasn't available when I entered as a freshman. So I took the number one spot higher (the same number I held in junior high football) and it has been mine ever since. A lot of what I do -- screen names, passwords, lottery picks -- uses the number 25 in some way.

2) I'm not sure when I started liking poetry. I think it was at the point where I really didn't want to read literature, especially anything that was really old, mainly because it didn't speak with me (and still doesn't today, as many of my favorite books are biographies, self-help and non-fiction. aka "real stuff"). But poetry could be completely abstract and wouldn't come across as a big block of words on the page.

Instead, it was small blocks of words -- stanzas, often times open for interpretation. This is what drives many people away from poetry or prose pieces because they need a "right" answer. They need to know what exactly the author or narrator is trying to say. But I feel it's harder to write good poetry (especially when rhyming and keeping strict rhyme patterns) because everything is measured. You can't waste words.

I'm not sure when I bought, "The Best Loved Poetry of the American People," but I know I didn't spend more than $3 on it and I know that the copyright date is 1936. I also know that I've read very few of the 648 pages. I liked the book because it was split into sections of poems concerning things like: inspiration, poems that tell a story, love and friendship, childhood and youth, humor and whimsey, etc. And there are a ton of poems that make up this hardcover book. In fact, I only had one bookmarked.

3) In cleaning off my desk, I found an old small sheet of note paper with a poem on it. My Intro to Poetry class group used this poem, "Thinking About the Past," by Donald Justice, in our final project. I've been thinking about my past a lot lately, so it was weird that I finally decided to clean up, for whatever reason, and found this paper.

2.5) I replaced an old receipt marking my bookmarked poem with that note paper from my desk.

4) My favorite poem in the book doesn't matter so much in content (at least not right now) as in something I noticed for the first time Thursday night before going to sleep. It's located on page 25 of that book printed in 1936. My favorite poem in the book on the page of my favorite number. And I closed the book and got into bed for the night.

But it was too odd to leave at that. I got out of bed, turned on the light, and went to another 25 -- page 125. And in the section marked "Inspiration" I found "To the Men Who Lose" by George L. Scarborough. I'll spare you the space of typing out the entire poem, but considering myself kind of a "hard luck loser" at times, the whole thing made sense to me, especially the lines:

"The king is he who, after fierce defeat,
Can up and fight again."

I've always felt that desire, patience and persistence can combine to become a great weapon in life and these lines really re-iterated that to me.

Page 225 was a continuation, so I skipped it. But on page 325 is "Pray Without Ceasing" by Ophelia Guyton Browning. I'm going to go a little Colt McCoy on you here -- but with the belief in God part, not the blowing out my arm part. I've been praying for some guidance/answers for a long time and right when I feel like it's been a waste, I randomly find this:

"Unanswered yet? tho' when you first presented
This one petition at the Father's throne,
It seemed you could not wait the time of asking,
So anxious was your heart to have it done;
If years have passed since then, do not despair,
For God will answer you sometime, somewhere."

It was, at this point, that I said, out loud, to myself... "Wow." Call it complete coincidence, call it a sign, call it what you want -- this was something really, really weird to happen when it did. And it reminded me of a great dialogue from my favorite movie, "Rudy." The scene in the church goes:

Father Cavanaugh: Well, you did a helluva job, kid. Chasing down your dreams.
Rudy: I don't care what kind of job I did. If it doesn't produce results, it doesn't mean anything.
Fr. Cavanaugh: I think you'll discover that it will.
Rudy: Maybe I haven't prayed enough.
Fr. Cavanaugh: I'm sure that's not the problem. Praying is something we do in our time. The answers come in God's time.

Obviously the movie speeds up the process and Rudy gets accepted to Notre Dame in the next scene. But the message, at least for me, is still there. We can try all we want to control everything, and yet, there are things that just seem (or truly are) out of our control.
=====
So the overall concept here is that sometimes waiting isn't so bad. Sometimes if you turn "waiting" into "anticipating" you can keep your mind at ease, at least for a little while.

And sometimes, it pays to clean your desk if you're willing to be "wowed."

So I'll end this more upbeat post in much the same way I ended my somewhat depressing post of just a few days ago:

"If it's meant to be, it'll happen." Here's a toast to the hope that the best lies ahead in 2010 -- the year in which I turn 25 years old.

-----
Cited in this post:
"The Best Loved Poems of the American People." Selected by Hazel Felleman. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1936.

"Rudy." David Anspaugh, dir. Robert N. Fried, prod. Cary Woods, prod. DVD. Tri-Star, 1993.