Wanna Life.
Henri Nouwen “The one who can articulate the movements of inner life, who can give names to varied experiences, need no longer be a victim but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.”
Painfully I hold a conversation with a young lady who is not used to inward reflection. I start with a basic question, “What is the first thing you want to buy with the money you save?”
“I don’t know,” she answers, looking all over the place and finally down at the table. “Maybe get more minutes on my phone.” She says this while texting endlessly in the middle of our conversation.
She sat down where I was reading so I am assuming she has something on her mind. Avoiding all yes or no questions, I ask something a little deeper. “You have talked before about learning welding. When do the classes start?”
She jumps and seems to search through her mind for our previous conversations on this. “I don’t know. I’ve got a job now at a fast food place and I don’t want to lose it. Besides my family wants me to earn some money first and I live at home so I can’t really do anything else.”
From that point on she talks freely about how she is a victim of everyone and everything in the system. She has no problem articulating why she can’t move on anything she wants to do and she is not sure what she wants to do. She can’t seem to move on to what she does want.
I fall back to an open ended question, hoping to discern why she sat down. “So, what’s up?”
Her face crumbles. “I just hate to get up in the morning. I want to have a life.”
“So, if you could wave a magic wand and you have a life, what would be different? “ I ask.
She laughs bitterly, “I wouldn’t look like this. I would have good clothes and people would see me as cool.”
“What would you be doing that is different?” I persist, trying to get a little deeper.
“I don’t know,” she wails. “I just don’t want to be who I am.”
Changing direction, I inquire, “What is one thing for which you are grateful?”
Startled, she says, “That I am not in jail like my brother and I’m not a drunk like my mother.”
Unable to move her off her insistence on what she can’t do or doesn’t want to be, I ask another standard question with teens, “What is one small step you can make that will be different than what you usually do?”
Entrenched in her own despair, she is unable to think of anything.
“You sat down next to me,” I reminded her. “That’s different.”
With that, she is able to make a small suggestion of something she might do differently.
It’s a start.
There are too many of these youth who are trapped in a life that already suffocates them with no vision of a way out. She is only eighteen.
I’m not sure how to prepare youth for facing the world beyond High School. I’m sure that learning to reflect is one of them. Nouwen has it right on being able to articulate the inner life. Being able to name experiences as more than bad or good, to be able to recognize being on an inward journey of growth and adventure, and to feel free to dream wildly is as vital as eating and finding shelter. We all yearn for days that are new days and not just “other” days.
In faith,
Kaze