This Day.

This Day.

What was old is new again and what is freshly discovered seems all at once familiar. Life will present you with a string of contradictions when viewed with open eyes.

Today began with a church service at St. John the Divine, the World's largest Cathedral, and then brought with it a pair of paradoxes to remind the self that life is ever changing.

The journey to St. John's Upper West Side locale marked my first time attending mass in New York City. While I've always loved peeking into the welcoming sanctuary of a neighborhood house of worship, finding fleeting solace in its peace amid the chaos, I certainly would never have considered bringing a friend into St. Patrick's or Trinity Cathedrals the equivalent of sitting through an entire processional and service. So to actually be attending the 11 am Choral Eucharist at this particular spiritual mecca was an event that I'd not only always intended to experience, but was one that I found myself excited at merely by its happening.

I was raised in the Episcopalian church. And it remains one of the organized religions that I can more or less still stand behind. But having been almost completely removed from its traditions in recent years, it was surprising to me how familiar the entire service remained. Psalms and scriptures were as much a part of my consciousness as the awareness that I'm male and of a certain age. Collection and Communion followed one another with the satisfying familiarity of a conversation with an old friend. What was new was old again. And that sensation brought with it an unspeakably moving sense of growth.




This evening, on the other hand, proved that the familiar can also surprise when one is not expecting it.

Walking off a long and delicious meal at Manhattan's Perry Street restaurant, my mother and I found ourselves standing at the west side of Washington Square Park and directly in front of my freshman year dormitory Hayden Hall. Upon my urging (and the deeper calling of my perpetually full bladder) we made our ways inside so as I could both use the facilities and take a short stroll down the always invigorating passageways of Memory Lane.

But once through those glassed doors that had proudly escorted me into my first taste of independence, it all seemed the same and yet somehow unsettlingly new. While there were many familiar occurrences, ranging from the bored Resident Assistant peering out from behind his partition of pointlessness, to the constant whirl of elevators opening and closing upon onslaught after onslaught of sweat suit sporting students, to the Campus Security Guard who had manned his same post since my days as an occupant some five years ago. Even the sight of a pudgy girl curled up on the lobby couch bawling into her cell phone seemed oddly at home here.

But the ceilings had somehow lowered with time despite my unchanged physical height. And the rooms had somehow shrunk regardless of their unaltered facilities. The overhead halogen lamps now shined a different hue of chemicalized yellow which set me slightly off balance. And the environment as a whole was without question a part of my immediate history and yet completely foreign to my present state of existence.

It was perhaps not at this time, but later, that I started to think about how much our concepts of time and memory can shift without our awareness. And even more so than this, how quickly our lives can change without our agreement to let them. While I've certainly moved on from academic life in my post-collegiate years, I never remember allowing for my former home to become a stranger to the me I know today. And while I have for the most part left the Episcopalian church as I've grown into adulthood, I never knew that it had, in this same time, refused to leave me.

Such adaptable creatures, we prove ourselves to be.

A move to the place you feel your heart is guiding you towards. An ending of the job you never thought you'd begin in the first place. The family that is as much a part of your chemical makeup as your blood cells or your muscle tissue, here, asleep on your couch. In this moment. At this time.

Life will always throw you for a loop and bring a change when you aren't looking. Often in the smallest of ways. It is in our adapting to these changes that we prove our strength.

Life will not always be the way it is today. And, without our even realizing, yesterday has already passed. For many reasons I am terrified by this fact. For many reasons I hate that there can be no other way. But through this anger and this fear, the living of our fragile, lovely lives still manages to move forward.

And with it, so do we.