The People You Meet

After a while, you begin to realize that the people you interact with really do begin to shape the way you live your life. It's in the small things, like phrases or looks that you pick up. But it is in the big things, too, in the way you spend your evenings, think about society or even how you find love. Everyone that we have any real contact with either reaffirms or questions our direction.

I wonder how this all works out. I mean, are we naturally drawn to those who mostly reaffirm our direction so that we must do less altering to our life? Is there some subconscious motivator that drives our direction towards that of someone we admire? What if, in a single evening, you meet someone who changes the way you have thought about everything? Should you file those emotions away to ponder over time or should you alter course now, not knowing how your life will change?

Spring?

A new semester has begun, and with it comes a time for renewal, for progress, for love and life. A great friend got married last weekend, and I was able to spend some time with other college friends while in Atlanta for the ceremony. time has come for another Civic Theatre production, and I am looking forward to getting in the theatre again. I just finished up a five-week program with middle schoolers where we explored the role of engineering in all aspects of food: growing and production, packaging, nutrition, waste processing, even genetics. Made me want to be in a classroom even more and also gave me a chance to meet some wonderful people I wouldn't have otherwise gotten to know.

This afternoon, as the dirty, salty snow melt runs across the Indiana asphalt, I hark back to hiking on hot Carolina summer days and watching the cool, clear water flow from its mountain source and shimmy ever so delicately over the rocks' surface. I would give anything to spend a barefoot hour there: my feet in the water, lying on the cool rock, sun beating down from its heavenly perch with such intensity as to make me believe it wishes it could join me on this perfect afternoon.

It intrigues me how such diverse experiences, those of Indiana snow melt and a Carolina mountain stream, can be so connected to one another. I have always been drawn to water, not so much its presence but more its movement. I think this comes in large part from spending time with my paternal grandfather, a man who has shown me and taught me more about the outdoors than almost anyone else. He now owns about 50 acres in the middle of South Carolina and has moved the path of his creek several times now. I think he sees the flowing water as a thing to treasure; a thing not unlike life. So often we think that when our time comes to leave this world things stop, but they don't. And so they don't stop for us, either, really. I think my grandfather sees in the water's coursings our own journeys, never ceasing, overcoming dams and falls.