As I was rearranging the bookshelves in my office this week, I found some old books that once had a lot of meaning for me – books that I thought I would never throw away. I turned them over once or twice, wondered, why the hell am I still holding on to these? and quickly tossed them into a large plastic garbage bag before I could change my mind. Throwing them away was a real Zen moment of spontaneous action followed by a lightening of the spirit.
One of the tossed books was a small spiral sketchbook that I used to practice writing Chinese characters in college. I thought I was pretty smart in college, majoring in Asian Studies, studying the Chinese language. I was sure that the world was just waiting for me to graduate so I could go forth and make my mark on it. Of course I would change the world. There was no doubt in my mind that I was meant for bigger things – for graduate school, maybe even a PhD some day.
The application for graduate school at the University of Hawaii arrived a few weeks after I ran into my old flame. After stoking the glowing embers of our old romance, the flames of passion erupted once again, and two months later the engagement ring slipped onto my finger. Six months later we were married. Within two months I was pregnant.
I buried the University of Hawaii application, along with the school’s catalog, bursting with pictures of paradise, in the bottom of my desk drawer. Over the next twelve years, I would take it out at various times and stare down at the pages, imagining the other life I had in mind for myself so long ago.
I took it out when money was tight and we argued a lot over the bills and expenses. I took it out in the winter, when sick children kept me immobilized in the house for weeks. I took it out with each pregnancy, as my body ballooned out of shape and I felt like my brain was slipping out through my ears, and when life became so boring and monotonous it brought me to tears.
That catalog was moved from desk drawers to moving boxes to dresser drawers. It survived an apartment, three rented houses and two purchased homes before I finally threw it into the trash one day while I was cleaning out my desk to make room for the crib that would hold our third child. It was a relief to let go of that application. Right before I tossed it, I took one last look through the catalog and thought those pictures weren’t so great and those happy students walking around campus looked almost as young as my oldest son. Who was I kidding? That part of my life was over.
It was harder to get rid of that spiral sketchbook. I held onto it for another twenty-three years after I tossed the University of Hawaii application away. There was too much of me in that sketchbook. The marks on those pages were proof of the hundreds of hours of practicing brush strokes and memorizing strange tonal sounds. My youthful dreams of a future so different from my mother’s and her mother before her were poured onto those pages while writing the characters of a language that would be my ticket out.
I held onto that notebook to remember a time when I had a mind and dreams of adventure and travel to foreign lands. What happened to me? What happened to my mind? - was the more troubling question. I used to be able to read a Chinese newspaper and now I couldn’t identify any but the most basic Chinese characters in that book.
And then I saw, on a page dated April 1, 1976, I had written a character over and over next to what would become my new married name in just nine days. The pictogram consisted of three sections: the top portion was the symbol for family and marriage, the middle section was the symbol for heart, and the bottom was the symbol for friend. Together they formed the Chinese symbol for love.
I turned the sketchbook over in my hand one last time, opened the garbage bag and threw it in without a second glance. All my regrets of the past thirty-five years over the person I should have become went into the trash with that little book. There I stood, fifty pounds overweight, disheveled grey hair flying in all directions, creases forming on my upper lip, unable to remember the name of the book I finished reading (in English!) the night before - definitely not the image I thought I would become back in 1976, on the eve of my wedding, as I practiced writing my new name next to the Chinese symbol for love.
I didn’t need the book anymore. The world had never been waiting for me to change it. Without realizing it at the time, the world had been waiting to change me, to show me what really mattered in life.
As I glanced around my bookshelves and saw the beautiful faces of the family my husband and I had created through the years, I realized that I already had everything in that Chinese pictogram; I didn’t need to practice writing it anymore.
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