Light

Have you ever looked up at the sky and felt like what you saw was created just for you?  A reminder to you of where you want to be?  That happened to me the other day.  This last week has been insanely difficult.  I've been working and dealing with finals.  Finals are over for the semester and I survived.  But to give you an example of what my last couple of weeks have been like, I've been at the office every night or up studying at my apartment until about 3:30 the next morning.  I took some days off from work the last couple of weeks so that I could focus on my final papers and when the library closed I would come over to the office and research and study there.

Last week I had my final paper due for my British Literature class and that paper was nearly the death of me.  Simply put, the philosophy of Romanticism will never purely be defined because it is in constant transition.  For as long as man wants something beyond the thing he already knows, then Romanticism will continue to transcend what man already understands.  I had to write about that and whether, because of its inability to be defined, Romanticism a worthy Literary Movement.  What is at stake with this debate is the context in which every text can be analyzed, or should be analyzed, for that matter.  It's... essentially philosophizing about philosophy.  Yeah, it's enough to make your eyes twitch.  That was last week and I was at the office every night until about 2:30 the next morning, just to go home for a little sleep just to start it again.  I did take some days off of work last week, but I existed in the public library for the time I wasn't in the office.  Also last week, classroom discussions on the texts we were still reading for both my British Literature class and American Literature class, and a math tests were continuing on until the absolute last day of classes.  Thank the Heavens above, classes finally ended, and with one paper down and one more to go, as well as a math test, I was able to spend an entire week on research for my American Literature paper which I turned in on Wednesday.

I turned my final paper in just this past Wednesday night.  I was at the office all of Tuesday for work and until 6:30 6:30 a.m. Wednesday morning when I finished a completed draft of my paper.  I went home and slept for about 4 hours and then went to the public library and studied all day until I had to take my math final at 5:00 p.m.  After my math final I came back to the office and fleshed out my paper and revised it and smoothed out the rough spots.  I revised it down from 25 pages to 19 and it was a lot of work.  I e-mailed it to my teacher at 10:45 p.m., with a little over an hour to spare.  Needless to say, I'm exhausted.  Dealing with emotional things on top of finals and work, I am exhausted.  Yesterday after work all I wanted to do was go home and sleep for at least 1 year, but I had to stay late for work and then drag my exhausted tukhus to the grocery mart because all the food in my refrigerator has gone bad and I needed to grocery shop for the bare minimum.  And then I went home and did laundry.  I'm a bit ashamed to admit it but I haven't done laundry in 3 weeks.  Yeah... how gross is that?  It's okay if you are disgusted, I was too.

I don't remember checking out at the grocery mart because I felt like I was sleep-walking.  I walked out of the grocery mart and I saw the above sunset.  I've never seen rays of light like that before.  If you look closely, the sun is setting and the rays are bursting from below the mountain horizon up towards the sky and they are met by other clouds which the rays of light illuminate.  I stood at my car for about 15 minutes and just watched the sky.

When I see rays of sunlight, my soul is replenished.  They are a reminder of the future I'm seeking.  They are a reminder of an angelic child whom I love who I know is going to come to me and she is soft like the warmth of the sun and she is as surprising and invigorating, and comforting as a ray of light amidst the dark clouds.  This was my reminder when I felt so kicked down and soul-depleted from my lack of sleep and adult responsibilities.  This was my reminder that everything I'm doing right now is for a brighter day.  What is to come is not the end-all and I'm not saying that there isn't difficulty to be found in the future, but I have hope for the future and that's enough.  This was my reminder.  And it may sound highly conceited to suggest that God created that sunset just for me, so I won't say that, but I definitely know that he meant for me to see it and I'm grateful for it, all the same.