And so I yearn,

In these strange spring days, the world seems unstable. Things are changing, waking up, halfway through exploding into vibrant colour and spectacle. The weather isn’t warm, but it isn’t cold. It rains, but it doesn’t pour, and it doesn’t snow. The ground is damp; puddles form on the roads, where rivers once ran. Mud crawls into the damp corners of footpaths, and leaves are swept away revealing the ground beneath. Cigarette butts, plastic bottles, and paper bags are strewn across the street lit by sun. The semester is nearly over, but not quite.

Liminal. It is a word I hear a lot these days. Ever since the strange fascination with liminal spaces bloomed out of the backrooms and surreal horror, the word has become part of our daily vocabulary. It has become synonymous with strange, with discomfort, with eerieness. But is there not beauty in the liminal? Is there not beauty in uncertainty?

I look to the future with open eyes, aware that anything could happen. Things could dramatically change for the better or worse, or stay largely the same. I might be busy, or more free than ever before. I might have more responsibility, or less. The realities of the Rest of My Life are confronting my every thought, and I bear the weight of those possibilities with according uncertainty. Yet, I am not afraid. I am not uncomfortable.

Nearly. As transient of a word as they come; to be nearly something is to be in progress, in transformation. It is to be caught between one thing and another. To be nearly finished with college is to be halfway between growing up and the rest of my life. To be nearly over a relationship is to be halfway between loss and acceptance; neither over things entirely, nor consumed by woe. To be nearly grown up is to be neither naïve and youthful, nor quite as wise and intelligent as you might want.

I suppose life is, by its very nature, an uncertain thing. We never know what will happen tomorrow, or in a week’s time, or in a month’s, or a years. Life is the summation of a billion complex, interconnected systems that act upon each other in ways both profound, mysterious, and ineffable. Searching for a meaning to life is like searching for the end of infinity–it misses the point. Life has no meaning, merely transience. Life is growing, it is changing. It is seeing the impossibility, the uncertainty, and the incomprehensible, and accepting it for what it is. We will never know what makes life worth living, because any argument for meaning or purpose in life inevitably devolves into platitudes and circular reasoning. Life is worth living merely because it is life, and we only ever get one.

I know not what the future will bring, but neither does anyone. I know not what my feelings hold, what my mind may come up with, or what I may learn, but that is beautiful. Loss, rejection, heartbreak, failure, and grief will come. Let them come, I say, for with every loss is a journey. With every rejection is an attempt, a step. With every heartbreak was a story worth living.

I see the blooming of flowers in spring, the ever forward motion of life, and I smile, for in change is potential. In change there is hope. In change there is life.