Restless

I don’t know about you, but it’s unbelievably easy for me to feel restless. Perhaps it’s simply the nature of my state in life. I have spent the past three and a half years of my life in college. I have spent the past fifteen and a half years of my life as a student. Each fall, we pick our books, gather our notebooks and our freshly sharpened pencils and we head to class. We learn. We write papers. We ask questions. We take tests. And finally, we get grades. And it seems that the biggest change that occurs is now I far prefer my Pilot G-2’s to my No. 2’s.

Nevermind that over the course of only the past three and half years a thousand changes have occurred. That if I were to meet myself four years ago, I don’t know what I would think of that girl. That is another discussion.

The point is that right now, it feels as if I’ve been in the same place for a thousand years, doing the same things, watching the same tv shows, reading the same books, writing the same papers, all the while living in the same town of 150,000. It’s so easy to feel bored. It’s the curse of our generation, it seems.

Boredom. Really? That’s our curse? How insufferably…. Boring.

I can’t even stay interested in my own piece of writing. I just spent like ten minutes on facebook. Seriously. That just happened.

Real life drama, folks. That’s what keeps this blog going.

Anyway. I’ve been bored today. I ended up with a Saturday off and it has largely been spent doing homework. This, invariably, leaves me restless and bored, mostly because I have the attention span of a fly and can’t read for more than twenty minutes at a time. So I got up to get ready for my date with my fiancé… like an hour early.

So I look really pretty while I’m writing this. That’s a bonus.

Anyway, after I realized I was pretty much entirely ready and didn’t need the hour to get ready that I had scheduled for myself, I stood flossing my teeth (the ultimate sign that I’m bored. Seriously, if you see me flossing, get me some help) and wondering what I could do for the next hour. And I was struck by a thought.

And now that I’m back from another facebook excursion, I can tell you about said thought.

Sorry, had to skip that Dave Matthews Band song on Pandora too. It was getting to me.

I’ve spent a lot of time watching tv in my life. (And yes, this is related to my thought. I’m getting there) There has been many a day that I have found myself with a few spare hours and I have happily spent them watching such classics as How I Met Your Mother or Psych. I’ve spent pretty much an entire day on my mattress sprawled across my tiny CB living room floor watching movies. But here’s what I’ve realized. Those things sound really fun in theory, but they typically end up being unspeakably sad. You’re sitting there realizing you’ve spent the entire day by yourself, eating food and watching mindless tv, and you wonder what the hell you’re doing with your life.

Maybe that’s just me, but if I spend enough time by myself, I get introspective. Maybe that’s why we all strive to be so busy. We don’t like having those empty hours on our hands. Gives us the willies.

But that too is a whole other discussion.

Sometimes, when I’m in a slightly more productive thoughtful mood, I wonder what I could actually do to fill those long hours. The list is seemingly endless. Maybe the problem is we can never think of all those wonderful things we should or could be doing. Maybe we simply don’t feel like doing them. Mostly because we’re bored and restless. Nothing sounds entertaining. Everything just sounds horribly mundane. Achingly.. the same.

So what’s the fix? I thought of something that I think is the antidote to restlessness. Something that awakens you to the beauty of life. To the opportunities that are all around you. Opens your eyes to adventure and stirs you to real life. You ready?

Realizing who you are.

Every moment you’re bored is an opportunity to realize just who you were created to be. It’s an opportunity to reflect on your life and decide just what kind of life you want to be living. And perhaps realize it’s not the life you’re living. And perhaps it could even be the moment to summon the courage to change something.

Because you were created to live.

To live deep. To suck the marrow out of life. To be truly, fantastically, beautifully, tragically alive.

You were created. Crafted. Formed. Written. You are loved. Cherished. Valued. New.

Not a bad realization in a bored moment, right? Maybe it’s worth taking those moments to be quiet. To be still. Know He is God. And know who you are.

And besides. Even facebook gets boring after a while.