After surviving the devastating movings of close friends, the shame of the middle school locker room, and the petty in-fighting of every high school club from the school play to the soccer team, I cannot believe I’m finally here. Autumn 2021. Eighteen years old. Senior year. Truth be told, I’m not sure if I’ve yet to completely wrap my head around the concept that next year I’ll be packing my bags to attend a currently-undecided university, leaving behind my parents, my sister, my puppy, my tribe, my mentors, and my teachers who have walked every step of this magical (and sometimes painfully miserable) journey with me, guiding me into the woman I am today. And maybe it’s because I’m preparing to enter a new chapter in my life that I’ve noticed slight changes to my world, alterations that grieve my heart and knit my brow into concern as I ponder our future as a community, as a nation, and as a planet. While human beings have always been self-centered to a certain extent, I’ve watched in horror as entire classrooms go deadly silent the moment the teacher tells their students that they can use their phones, reducing all human interaction to the eerily quiet shifting of teenagers in their chairs as they try to find the best angle for their newest Snapchat post. I’ve witnessed in shock as the cafeteria, where once the guidance counselor had to use a whistle to hush the students so she could deliver a ten-second message, has become quieter than the library, everyone staring at the screen, head down, as they shovel grapes into their mouths without so much as looking up. I’ve seen, to my utter disbelief, kids totally ignore the principal speaking to them, their headphones concealed beneath their hoodies as they commence another round of Temple Run. Where are the adults screaming for kids to stop chit-chatting so the assembly can get under way? Where are the threats of punishment if students don’t stop laughing so they can hear morning announcements? Now, I’m not saying anyone should ever talk over another human being, because that’s just as disrespectful as not listening to them at all. However, in a society that depends on clear communication and human interaction, we cannot function if we refuse to acknowledge that the world on our phones is virtual reality, at best, one paragraph in the one thousand and one page book that we call our world, our space, our home.
Even though the extended quarantine we’ve all been living in for the past eighteen months has certainly caused us all to be more introverted than our previous selves, that doesn’t account for the self-isolation so many of us put ourselves through, nor does it explain why many of us are more real online than we are to one another’s face. I have been absolutely flabbergasted by the amount of people who would rather be hung, drawn, and quartered than have a conversation with me turn around and comment on my Instagram post, complimenting my hair, makeup, or clothes when they brush by me in the hallways without a second glance. While I am fully aware that sometimes giving compliments to someone can feel very intimidating, if we don’t have a culture where we empower one another, lift each other up when we are down, and make someone else’s gloomy sky a little less dreary, what kind of culture do we have? More so, what does that say about us if we can only bring ourselves to talk to someone behind our profile picture, away from their eyes, from their love, from being seen as just ourselves, no filters, no editing, no nothing?
“Things base and vile, holding no quantity, love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”
~ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
My freshman year English teacher introduced me to Shakespeare through Romeo & Juliet, and Willie and I have been in a literary love affair ever since. That following summer, I attempted to read several of his plays on my own, and I became increasingly frustrated at my inability to understand merely one line of his flowery poetry, the advanced vocabulary and Elizabethan English forcing my mind to dig through thickets of vines just to find one blossoming rose, and even then another thorn would snag me as I jumped to the next passage. Yet I kept at it, bringing a dictionary besides me whenever I read his works, looking up every single word I did not know, causing my reading pace to drop significantly. While other kids sped through story after story, oftentimes it took me ten weeks to read a two hundred page play, which mostly consisted of twenty lines of dialogue per parchment. And as someone who loves reading almost as much as she loves living, my ego took a huge hit in my quest to dissect the legendary author’s words.
But you wanna know something crazy? After struggling through seven of his novels on my own, I started to get the hang of it. I knew certain words and phrases that he repeated often, and learned how to interpret his text without having to pick up my dictionary every five seconds. I still needed my good friend Merriam-Webster every once in a while, but now it didn’t feeling like I was stupid or not smart enough to read Shakespeare. Now it felt as natural as breathing, because I could now identify when I needed to stop and reread a passage, when I didn’t know the meaning of a word, when I felt myself zoning out and had to pull myself back to the present. And that is both what our society is missing and what it longs for – silent, soothing serenity.
Whether we’re texting our boss on a Friday night or scrolling through Facebook on a Sunday morning, we are all constantly plugged in, on call twenty-four/seven, demanded to be thinking about or doing something that we can show off later on instead of listening to our bodies and giving them exactly what they need – rest. We weren’t made to be on top of things around the clock, at peak performance every single day. That’s not the way life works. Life, like progress, is not a linear path. There’s highs and lows, hills and valleys, and the ever-infuriating plateaus where we can’t see the fruits of our labors for the life of us. Yet even when we’re stuck in the middle of those static periods or falling down the side of that mountain, we’re still going, we’re still moving. There is treasure buried on every beach, silver woven through every cloud, and moonlight glowing in every night, but we will only see it and bring it into our hearts if we slow our scroll, our minds, and our lives enough to take notice. Archeologists do not search for submerged artifacts from the surface of the water; they dive miles and miles beneath the sun’s gaze, swimming through thicker and thicker darkness and stillness until they find the ruins dwelling peacefully beneath, whispering, “I’ve been here all this time; where were you?” Whatever storm we may be venturing through, may we pause our feed, turn down our soundtrack, and silence our phones, so we may look up and take in our glorious surroundings and listen for what God has asked us to not only let go of during this season of life, but to take hold of His hidden blessing and walk away with this new gem of truth.
Last Love 