When I was 18 or 19 years old, I wrote a poem about wanting to do everything, wanting to possess the Universe.

I asked, back then — I really, desperately wanted to know — “how long will it take me/ to count all the raindrops in the sea?” 

Funny how it has become a theme of my life.

Everyone who knows me, knows of my insane, immense drive to succeed, to get things done, to reach perfection. But what if perfection were as wide as the world — what if I must follow along a thousand branching pathways to get to where I want to go? Have you ever felt like you wished you could hug the world? That is my deepest desire.

Impossible, you say.

Yes, it’s impossible.  

I took a week off writing to catch up on that psychology course, and to start my volunteer work in a special high school. I felt so guilty. How could I just put precious writing aside so brazenly — like it’s yesterday’s newspaper!  But I reminded myself that the teaching, the studying, those, too, are the things I was put on this earth to do.

This week, it’s back to writing, my friends, because that’s who I am.

  Impossible as it is, I am hugging the world, every day. Sometimes I am afraid that I am insane, that I have taken on too much, that I am going to get lost among my many chosen winding pathways.

 But then, I remind myself that everything makes sense, that I wouldn’t have become a mom, wouldn’t have chosen to study teaching and spend time with high school kids, wouldn’t have spent years of tearful joyful torturous ecstatic tired hopeful hopeless nights and days and mornings if I wasn’t meant to do all those things — to taste every salty raindrop there is, to walk along a thousand winding pathways.