From the archives: Showy displays of abundance
I’m taking the month of August off to soak up the last days of summer and renew my creativity. This month, you’ll be receiving prewritten, shorter versions of Choosy or content from the archives. Thanks for supporting my newsletter, it means so much to me. I’ll be back September 3.
When I was in high school, I would drive to the campus of Southern Methodist University to do research in the library for my senior thesis. My little blue car parked at a meter on the side of the most recognizable building on campus, I’d carry my massive purse loaded with books across the main lawn, slightly slouched as I went.
I had not yet made decisions about where to go to college and I was in that tender time of teenage years where you’re at the cusp of responsibility and agency but you haven’t grasped it. The world was full of options for me but I didn’t have to make any decisions just yet.
One day, while I was walking along a shaded, curved path back to my car after some time of research, I stopped to take a photo of one of the pretty red brick buildings. I love red brick. It was a thing for me, finding red brick buildings and photographing them wherever I went. This one, with its historic charm and the contrast of the crisp white window frames, struck me.
I remember casually thinking, maybe praying, “I would love to go to a school like this.”
Attending that school was, in my mind, so far out of the question that the thought didn’t move beyond that — I wasn’t working out a plan to make it happen. It truly never crossed my mind that it would be an option; it was never a possibility. It wasn’t a negative or sad thing that I felt that way, either, it was just reality. I did well in school but I was not that sort of scholarship smart that opens doors that look like full-ride scholarships to prestigious, expensive universities. I never dreamed of telling my parents that I wanted to apply there, a private college planted in the middle of the city’s most visibly affluent neighborhood. It was just too impractical and unrealistic, so unnecessary.
But the buildings were beautiful and the grass was green and I felt so grown up when I walked to the library.
A few years later, while I was attending another college, I had this sense that it wasn’t where I was meant to be. That was it, just a sense. On a whim, I applied to SMU. Nothing had changed, it was still inordinately expensive and, to be honest, only two things drew me there: this sense that I should apply and the beauty of the campus.
So, I applied. I got in. I cried when I got the acceptance letter and I cried when I got a massive scholarship and more added to it later. I went to school and parked myself, almost every day, at the same set of meters I’d parked at years before.
My first day of classes, I walked the sidewalk in front of the library. The sun was shining, it was August and the grass was somehow still green — in August, in Texas. I remembered that moment, years ago, when I had uttered that little dream in my heart about going to school in a place like this.
Well, I was going to school in a place like this.
In the grand scheme of miracle accounts, a girl getting into a college she likes is not unthinkable. But it felt so extravagant and so comically superfluous that I had to laugh. And I did laugh in delight while I was walking around campus that first day. It was just too silly that this critical moment in my life’s trajectory — a choice that would shape much of my future — came down to the fact that I liked red brick buildings.
I think, whether or not you’re a person of faith, the only way to survive in this life, really, is to believe that life can surprise you and that it can surprise you for the better. This was one experience — there have been others — in my life that solidified in me a sense, a hope, for abundance. It’s this belief that an oversupply of joy could come my way, the belief that something beyond all hopes and dreams, something outside of my imagination, is available.
Abundance is not the same as excess, though it’s fair and reasonable to make that parallel. Excess has no point, but abundance serves a purpose. It begets wonder, it broadens your view, it expands your thinking — the purpose of abundance is abundance. It makes you want to soak everything up but, at the same time, preserve that moment in its perfect state, so that it’s untouched and uninterrupted.
I’ve felt an overwhelming sense of abundance when I’ve wandered historic buildings and gardens, when I’ve watched old movies with elaborate sets and when I go into a grocery store with a bountiful fresh produce on display. I feel it, also, in the moments when I realize that all the little dots of experiences in my life led to one dream come true of a moment.
I want to live from that place where you know that there is more than you could ever ask, think or imagine ahead of you. It’s an awareness that there is something far beyond what you could ever expect available to you, something that you didn’t account for or prepare for. You could never have measured for it or seen it coming.
All the best,
Mary Grace