Personal Essay: The Things I Learned This Summer

Reflections on time, travel, and the things that plant hope

Shot on 35mm film in Venice, Italy

When I was a kid, I was terrible about picking my scabs. They say some blood is more prone to attracting mosquitos: if that’s true, that’s the kind of blood I have. Every summer, I would accumulate so many bites, counting them became something of a game. I can recall even once or twice intentionally forgoing bug spray, surrendering to the vile little creatures in order to beat the 40 bite benchmark. When the bites itched, I scratched them. I was never particularly concerned about exercising any self-control there. When the bites bled they formed scabs, and when the scabs itched I scratched those too. At some point, I remember realizing that the more I scratched, the longer I prolonged the healing process. It was cyclical: a bite, scratch, a scab, scratch, a fresh wound, scratch, a scab, scratch. Again and again and again. My mom told me I was going to give myself life long scars if I couldn’t get myself together. But I was not to be deterred. When the bites itched, I was going to scratch them, even at the cost of my own blood. And furthermore, when I realized I was good at racking up the mosquito-induced wounds, I encouraged it, laying down my bug-spray defenses.

I have learned that in life, I am prone to the same: I like to scratch old wounds, and I am eager to indulge them. And just like I learned after sun-kissed summers in North Carolina, the more you pick at what itches, the longer it hurts you.

After graduating college and before entering the working world, this summer was something of an in-between season for me. It had me thinking about the past and the future, where I’ve been and where I’m going. That can be a dangerous playground for excessive introspection. I play with the same doubts, same fears, same painful memories. My life hasn’t been particularly dramatic, but I fixate on whatever soil is there.

I was lucky enough to spend this season abroad: I hiked the Camino de Santiago in Spain and traveled with a friend throughout Europe afterwards. When you’re traveling, trying new things, meeting new people, taking in new sights, there’s a lot to distract you from thinking about yourself. There was a particular moment when I recognized this.

My friend Laura and I were on an overnight bus where we had accidentally been separated. We would each spend the next 8 hours trying to get a night’s rest beside a stranger. I was frustrated, but on top of that, I was in a defensive and insecure mood. Maybe Laura and I had argued about something. I’m not sure, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that just as our bus starting rolling off, the sun caught my window just right and cascaded golden-hour light all over me. Just like that, I felt everything soften. It felt like a physical grace.

It prompted this thought: sometimes I am a little gruff because of my insecurity, but there’s grace for that. I like that there’s grace for all our arrogance, all the thinking more of ourselves than we ought. We are such self-centered little creatures, but I have felt grace calm the lies of pride when I am loved anyway. It’s the same as receiving a good gift like warmth against your skin, even when you were being a pill. It’s that golden hour light piercing through a mustard-yellow curtain on a bus to Paris. It sets fire to the fabric and colors the stranger sleeping against the window sill. The light feels like something you could drink or wrap around you like a blanket, or something that pierces through your body and breathes hope into whatever is inside. It’s hard to remember to be the center of attention when the light is dancing like that, and therein lies the magic of it all. I saw something beautiful and it distracted me from myself, a necessary distraction indeed.

The next time Laura and I found ourselves on an overnight bus, we sat side by side. Sharing one pair of earbuds between us, I queued songs that make life feel ethereal. They were the kind of songs that make you feel simultaneously that everything is very important, but also that everything is temporal and over so soon. At several points throughout the trip we did this: we listened to sad songs about endings, and remembered that college and our collective time in Chapel Hill is over. We remembered that a lot of good things, a lot of our favorite things, weren’t going to be true of our lives anymore when our flights landed back in the US. Throughout our trip, we were mostly oblivious to this reality, but occasionally we stopped to notice it. Europe was a sweet liminal space where everything felt light, despite the fact that we truthfully had both entered seasons of intense transition.

So on the bus to Prague, we played this nostalgic song, watched the sunset, and Laura cried. (That isn’t a particularly exceptional occurrence.) Afterwards, enjoying the feelings and ready for more, she turned to me and said, “make the magic happen again.” I laughed and found another song. I felt so thankful for that particular moment, the one that existed just as I was inside of it. We were thinking about our pasts and futures, but I felt tangibly situated on that very bus ride. That’s when I realized this: mainly what we get is a collection of single moments like that, and that’s ok. When we look back and compare all the moments we can remember, there’s just a handful of magical seconds that stick out. There’s a lot of change between them, and that’s the same thing as loss. When we look back, we recount a lot of good things, the passing of those good things, and new things born in their place.

The idea of change used to wreck me. As a kid, in the same era of the mosquito bites, I was terrified to grow up. Really, that’s just a fear of loss. It’s wanting something to be eternal, wanting something beautiful enough to sustain us in a world that offers so much change. But looking back, I thought about the times I had feared change, and then loved the new things that grew in place of the old. I didn’t feel so afraid of the change anymore. Instead, I felt grateful. Grateful for all the little moments that comprised college, all the ones I was experiencing in Europe, and all the ones that live in the future.

It must be the case that this is what times does: it gives us new gifts and it softens old wounds. In both cases, the beauty and the pain have a temporality to them. I think this contextualization is helpful to hold things in their proper place. Every season will fade into something else, the good and the bad. And still, every story is contextualized in a world so big, so complicated, it’s hard to imagine any one affliction can be too permanent. Time will carry us away from beautiful things we loved; it will carry us to new beautiful things, too. Time is healing and time is death. Maybe the two are one in the same.

When I keep picking at these old wounds again and again, I’m trying to erase time. I could keep doing that. I could spend forever living in the past, in the playground of old doubts, fears, and painful memories, thinking I could work through them if I indulge them with enough time. But time doesn’t do that, it doesn’t give you more of the past. It carries you away. It carries you to something new, and you have to let the scab heal. You have to let all those fancy cells in your body do the thing where they regenerate new skin and bury the scar. Healing takes time, but not time for over-indulgence. It demands you sacrifice that. There is a season for patiently sorting through things, but then there is a season for release.

I have one more story from Europe that really drove this home for me. It’s from my hike, when I was walking 500 miles along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. There’s a place along the pilgrimage called Cruz de Ferro, where pilgrims leave behind small stones they’ve carried with them from home. The idea is that in releasing your rock, you’re symbolizing the spiritual and emotional release that’s happening internally. I tend to be skeptical of forced-symbolism. I don’t appreciate being told something will be meaningful, I prefer to just find it on my own. Manufactured hype feels cheap. So naturally, I felt indifferent towards Cruz de Ferro as we journeyed to it. I didn’t even have a rock. But in the days just leading up to it, I started with all these thoughts about time and hope and healing, the thoughts I’m sharing with you now. I felt a gentle nudge that maybe, there were things I needed to let go of and stop indulging. There are several stories in my life (remember the doubts, fears, and painful memories) that feel incomplete. I tend to return to them because it seems like they need more closure. Along the Camino, I realized closure might never come. Instead, I might have to choose to release them as they are. Grace makes room for that. Grace redeems things even in their incompleteness. As we got closer to Cruz de Ferro, I decided it might not be manufactured hype after all.

When we made it, I think we were all more impacted by the visual than we anticipated. It was a mountain of rocks, a hill assembled with the stories people left behind. Some of the stones had words or even pictures attached to them. In the center of it all was a huge wooden pillar with a cross on the top. People were laying down their burdens, choosing to release the things that hurt them in exchange for something better. You don’t always get to release something when you’ve made sense of it and can understand the healing. Sometimes, you let it go just because you can’t carry it anymore and time is carrying you away. I thought about release and about faithfulness: the cross, a symbol of a God I have known to be faithful to me. I want more energy to be faithful in return, and less energy spent on carrying what has become too heavy.

On that same day, a friend of mine was dealing with a very serious grieving of her own. She had lost her great-grandmother and was in mourning. Two of us stood with her, arm-in-arm, at the bottom of the stones. We stood in the grief together. Afterwards, I presented her with a tiny bouquet of wildflowers I’d collected on that day’s walk. We left them on top of the mountain, adding our token to the stories of grief and healing. We did it to honor her great-grandmother, someone who shaped my friends’ life and added beauty to it. This is another thing about release: we can’t tackle it all alone. We do it alongside one another; we grieve and grow together.

I walked away from Cruz de Ferro feeling extraordinarily light and hopeful. It’s because I had encountered beauty: the mourning and courage of my friend, in a place where so many before us have marked their mourning and their courage. Time was still taking us all forward, to a better and more beautiful story despite whatever had been heavy.

What I have learned, over and over again, is that beauty spurs hope. When we catch a beautiful sunset, taste a perfect meal, receive an undeserved kindness, or belly laugh with a close friend, we brush up against what is undeniably, irrevocably good. When confronted with that, it becomes difficult to keep choosing hurt. We cannot keep picking our scabs when we are forced to reckon with something better. These experiences fuel us to believe in beauty enough to hope for our own tomorrows.

It offers evidence of a good and right story beyond ourselves, and my faith names that story. It’s the one about Jesus, pursuing humanity and reconciling us to himself. It’s a story that explains the movement of history as one that moves towards redemption. That’s healing. That’s freedom. I mentioned earlier longing for something eternal in the midst of all the change. On this earth, mainly we get change. I’ve written all this to urge you to see that the change is good, that there is hope despite it and because of it. Still, I think that draw for eternal beauty isn’t silly. I think all the beauty of this world is a glimpse into the story of God, loving humanity, rescuing us. I think it’s a story that is complete the other side of heaven. Christian theology teaches that God’s story is invitational and is hopeful; it compels us to foster more goodness on this earth while looking towards perfect goodness when we’re united with Christ in Heaven. When I’m given the choice between hoping for that story and picking at old wounds, I want to start choosing hope.

When I see beauty, it beckons me. It calls me to come and be a part of it, at the expense of the old doubts, fears, and painful memories that I like to dwell on. It’s a good surrender, a crucial one even. Grace, experienced in the kindness of those around us and the majesty of the earth, is the promise that beauty is for us. It is calling us in even if we’re notorious for insecurity and scab-picking. This earth is one of dancing, pasta, mountains, wildflowers, love, and rejoicing. None of that will erase the pain, but it provides something worth clinging to in the midst of it.

There comes a time when you discover hydrocortisone (pretty sick anti-itch healing powers in that tube) and you stop scratching your mosquito bites. There simply must come such a time. If it doesn’t find you, you have to find it. I may have run the mosquito-bite analogy into the ground, but the truth is all there. After the seasons of mourning roll over you, release them. Be faithful to beauty instead of pain. Let old wounds rest until you realize they’ve healed, and dance inside of a good world, inside of a good story that includes you. You have been invited into the good story of redemption, and from your bondage you can be set free.