Notes, Doodles and Lines
From my younger self...
LONG LOST NOTES
They sit and wait, long forgotten and collecting dust in the corner of your mind. Once diligently taken, studied, memorized, and regurgitated for a grade, the long-lost notes of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood become a blur of "the years when I was in school."
I stumbled upon an old notebook, scribbled in, doodled on and filled with hastily written, truncated sentences. This glimpse into my past propelled me back into the classroom. The familiar fill my senses, the feel of paper, wooden desks, old books, and the faint scent chalk in the air (do they even still use chalk?)
You could easily tell which boy caught my fancy by checking the margins. Tiny hearts, initials in swirling loops, a doodled language of longing on every page. Freely expressed with the knowledge that no one else would ever lay eyes on the emotional spillage from my adolescent heart.
There’s something sacred about those pages. A mix of chaos and curiosity, a peek into what I was dreaming and who I was becoming, in ink and graphite. Moments of half-listening, sketching, writing lyrics and pondering questions too big for that classroom.
These notes aren’t merely academic. They are artifacts. Evidence of a mind in motion, a spirit quietly stretching its wings inside the structure of the system. I don’t remember everything I learned, but I remember how it felt to site there. To drift, to resist, to care deeply and pretend as if nothing mattered.
DRAWING LINES
Each word, each letter, is a definition… a boundary. The moment something takes form, it becomes confined. This is how we move through the world as humans: we name, sort, label, assign. Our big beautiful brains trying desperately to conceive the unconceivable. To wrap language around mystery.
We crave clarity. We strive to understand.
Some of us search for answers by feeling into the questions. Exploring. Experiencing. Unfolding layer by layer.
Others seek to be told: Just show me the way. Hand me the rulebook. Spell it out. Belief systems built on certainty are alluring and thrive on this desire. It’s easier, more convenient, and reassuring to be handed meaning than to forge it yourself.
After all, yourself may be wrong.
…
I never quite fit inside that framework. My parents encouraged questioning. To trust my own eyes. To keep digging, even when the answers felt uncomfortable. Much to the dismay of church teachers, the Chordas kids were full of questions.
What about my Jewish friend, will she go to hell?
If God is all loving and forgiving, why would hell even exist?
Black is my favorite color. Does that mean I’m bad?
We weren’t trying to be difficult. We were trying to understand.
…
Truth does not lie within the answers. It lives in the space between… In the willingness to wonder, to doubt, to listen.
Definitions, boundaries, labels and lines drawn all help us to define and navigate our confusing world. They are important. But when they become too rigid and unforgiving they stop serving.
They shrink what was once alive.
Doesn’t it better serve us to allow the questions to linger?