A Story

The sun is shining brightly as it slowly sinks toward the horizon. A cold wind blows my hair into my face, a remnant of an unforgiving winter and a fickle spring. Wolfville has finally come back to life. The skateboard park is back in use. Friends and couples wander the dyke trails, with dogs or children in tow. The barista chats away while I wait for my order. My peers make last minute NSLC runs. Turns out, our special talent for spontaneity and procrastination isn’t restricted to our academic endeavours. As always, I fail at doing the right 20-something thing on a Saturday night. All that awaits me at home is this blog post and some fantastic loose leaf tea I picked up last weekend in Mahone Bay. 

Once the fog of essay writing faded, I returned to one of my favourite pastimes, reading for pleasure with no reading list insisting on my progress. Today, I finished An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. This novel annoyed me and then charmed me, much like that boy in seventh grade that you always rolled your eyes at. I also recently finished Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s one of those books that just sits in the pit of your stomach, in the crevices of your brain, and the centre of your heart, burning through your misconceptions and illuminating the questions you wrestle with silently. 

These are all stories: a story of my walk through town, a story of a whiny, heartbroken ex-prodigy, and a story about a woman who is an immigrant, a blogger, and a lover (and much more, this is the brief synopsis). Tonight, it feels like these stories, along with the music of James Bay, Taylor Swift and Walk the Moon blaring through my headphones, help me approach my big questions. Like whether or not I should write an English honours thesis, and how I can beat my apathy regarding frustratingly slow re-entry into math-research mode. Like what I should do with my life next year, and where I should go to grad school. How I will stay connected to my widespread network of kindred spirits and heart family as my financial and temporal reality starts to bulldoze my long list of people and places to visit. If I can seek adventure and further intellectual depth post-university and still pick up my cross and follow Jesus. The easy questions… 

It doesn’t take too many Saturday night walks or John Green novels to remind me that I’m actually rather dreadful at being 20. Or maybe my fellow 20 year olds also spend their Saturday knee deep in written existential crises. As John Green and my friend Bri might say, this is my shout into the void. Not really a request for your answers or advice, although I will listen to those as well as I can. But just a few minutes to express my simultaneous frustration and deep love for my surroundings, the people that populate them, and the ambiguity that so often reigns. 

Why did I love Americanah so much? I’m so glad you asked. This book is funny and intelligent and so insightful. Its bare bones analysis of life, love, sex, culture, race, privilege, postcolonial spaces, politics, wealth (I could go on…) is startling, probably offensive to some, and profound. It’s also a love story about companionship and friendship and, dare I say it, soulmates. This love story is messy and broken by silence and shame, but it’s real love, somehow worth the mess and the baggage. 

I finished Adichie’s novel while I was at MarkEast, starting a 7 day study of the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Genesis is also startling, offensive, messy and profound. Shockingly, it does not explicitly endorse patriarchal power or a scientific account of our world’s origin. Instead, it presents the LORD God as a Creator who creates good things, makes humankind in His image, and provides again and again for his creation who are prone to being fickle, stubborn and self-serving. Yahweh Elohim is trustworthy even in a world governed by fatalism, fear and violence. 

I love literature because its stories illuminate my life by broadening the horizons of the world I see, promoting empathy, compassion and self-reflexive analysis. In the case of Genesis and Adichie’s novel, the ripples will continue to wash over my heart and head in the years to come. And my plan is to continue reading and searching, trying to unravel the mysteries of love and grace, why love drives us and breaks us and heals us, why grace puzzles us and delights us and offends us. And as I go, I hope that truth in all of its forms, from sun beams to manuscript studies to long chats with professors to chance encounters with golden retrievers to copwin strategies to a belly laugh with best friends to art, will continue to set us free.

“And the world will turn and we’ll grow, we’ll learn how to be incomplete. This here now it’s where we touch down. You and me let’s be incomplete.”