A note for the blog: I’ve been trying to write this blog for 2 days. For me, I feel like I have this bittersweet talent of being able to step back and watch myself in a situation, how I’m responding, how I’m acting, how the others surround me are reacting to me… I’ve grown to call it super-conscious, or hyperawareness. It is an odd phenomenon that feels like disassociation and free association in the same breath. I’ve tapped into this ‘talent’ (persay?) while debating, or discussing, or even while dozing off… watching myself and having it feel a little bit like time slows down so I can become aware of the words that I am say and how to repair or thinking faster in terms of the situation. Anyway… what this has to do with blogging, in particular, this blog… I have watched myself sit at the keyboard, with this blog open, and change task, start new AIM conversations, obsess over songs… etc. I do not know why I am purposefully avoiding this blog, or writing it… but… here I am now. Trying to be focus. Writing about writing it, still distracted. Let get to it…. shall we?
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I was driving home from one of my best friend’s houses, and I pass by a father and his daughter walking in the setting sun light. As I passed by I heard the daughter say: “Where the Sidewalk Ends!”…
As part of my lenten journey, I am fasting from music in my car while driving. It has been a struggle, and I’m the first to admit that I’ve screw up from time to time… I just really like my tunes. But as I was reflecting on what this journey has been for me, there have been times when I appreciated so greatly the silence, or the sounds of creation: the wind, the birds, the hum of night. I wonder if we drown out our world because we have forgotten how it is to hear things clearly. We turn up the volume, plug in our headphones, and forget to listen.
I’ve been working on listening too. Its been a major part of my lenten journey, one that my fasting represents. Listening to others, listening to God, listening to silence.
I’ve always been afraid of silence and what it represents. For me, silence is deafening. It represents my hearing loss, the voices, the strange quietness of anger. I have never been comfortable with being quiet, being still, being silent. Existing in silence scares me… a lot. For me silence represents everything I’m terrified of, and music, noise, voice, anything represents comfort & safety.
I have often said I do not feel like my hearing loss is a disability, but rather a blessing. As true as this is most of the time, my looming promise of deafness… scares me. I’ll be honest, as much as I have tried to instill a positive attitude about losing my hearing, it is frightening to realize that I will face a world one day deaf. That I will see lips move, and speaker pound, and will not hear a thing. In a world where almost everything is controlled in some sense by sound, as I look forward, I often feel lost. I don’t try to thing about it much, and it really is a blessing. I’ve had so many amazing, (and I mean amazing, just read: We leave in 5 Days, 14 Hours, and 30 Minutes) experiences sharing my life with the deaf community and the amazing position I am to be part of both worlds. When it comes time for me to join the deaf community, I fully heartedly know that I will embrace it for what its worth. But fear still lingers in the corners, and since I never truly know when (or, honestly, to some degree if) it will happen, there is sort of a level of vigilance and fear that accompanies my life at all times.
But God has been working in this. I think, as I am a human, I need to feel vindicated, justified for the wrongs I have been dealt. Why did I deserve to be deaf? Why me? What did I do? But as one of my best friend’s (the same friend’s house who I was driving home from last night) would say: Its all about you, isn’t it?
I’ve been thinking about this, and how my reaction has been to the fact that I won’t have my music in mexico (the whole watching what I’m doing while in the process kind of thing) and I’ve seen myself become indicative, resentful that the leaders don’t have good music taste and that I won’t get my sounds, and I’ll be forced to listen to their crap and so on and so forth. I’ve been listening to music non-stop for the past few days, trying to absorb the most of it… but when I really really think about it… some of the best times of my life have been when the music is off, the road is load, the conversation is reached its (every 7 minute) lull… and we are just all at peace…. like… there is something that happens, when silence transcends mindless chatter. When silence becomes beautiful.
This thought really hit me while I was driving home… I would have never heard that little girl say the word, “Where the sidewalk ends” if I hadn’t had the music turned off, the windows down, and the car going slow. I caught, in that little sentence, a picture of innocence, of myself, of who I was. And in that moment… I realized who I am, and who I will be. In that moment of silence, interrupted by the line of a cherish poem from a little girl holding her father’s hand tight… I realized what life is about: The silences that are beautiful. The things that make you filled with joy, with peace, with truth, with love. with patience, with self-control, with a longing for Him. The small times when you forget anyone else is in the whole church while you worship your one and only God. The times when you bear your scars, be real, open, vulnerable, trusting that He will carry you through.
Where the Sidewalk Ends……… Life begins.
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Where the Sidewalk Ends
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.
Shel Silverstein
