Inside the Cyclone

You know that scene on The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy is in her house when it gets picked up by the massive funnel cloud? The wind is deafening, and it's a "swirling vortex of terror" (actually, this is a Finding Nemo-ism, but I think the description fits). As Dorothy is looking out the window, we see cars and people and populated chicken coops, and it's like, "Yeah, we're in this cyclone, but we're in here together, so it's all good."

We are in a cyclone right now. Our moving day is quickly approaching. We will move out of our apartment on Monday, in just under a week. I feel a little like Dorothy. The view is terrifying, but I also have this strange calmness, as if there's a part of me that says, "It's all good. See, look at all the things that you can see out your window. You don't need to panic. No cyclone here." The few images that I can make out clearly are almost enough to make me ignore the roaring wind of stress and pressure around me and give me a false calmness. And the tragedy of it all is that it makes me say, "I have time," when the reality is that I don't have time. This is the same mentality that made high school cross country so hard--I'd take my time so that I was in last place, and then I'd have this incredible burst of energy at the end that I should have been using all along. It was this mentality that saw me through every single semester of college--procrastinating all of the work until the end and then flying by the seat of my pants amid a major mental meltdown. And guess what--I'm doing it again!

In just a week we say goodbye to Rexburg, to home, for an indefinite amount of time. And suddenly the actual moving process doesn't seem to be the real issue.