Waiting and Uncertainty

For the past few months, I’ve been doing a whole lot more posts focused on books and movies and TV shows, with the only references to contemporary reality coming in bits about nation-wide news and my own limited glimpse of it from my own life. No one living in the world right now really needs me to explain why: we’ve all been doing most of our living through fiction and the news these days. 

That’s an oversimplification, of course. My life has kept going on: this summer I visited my girlfriend twice, went to a socially distanced family reunion, gave literary enrichment sessions to every elementary schooler within a hundred feet of my house, and learned how to drive. But I haven’t been able to blog about any of those things, or anything else very personal this summer, and I think it’s because I didn’t have enough certainty about them to have anything meaningful to say. When would I be able to see my extended family or girlfriend again? Would I keep myself busy through the school year doing the enrichment sessions, or would some other opportunity work out? Would I be around Minnesota long enough to take my driving test? Most people talk about boredom and repetition when they describe the pain of COVID life, but the uncertainty is at least half of it. The waiting, boring and lonely as it is, would feel a lot more bearable if you had any idea when it would end and what you would do next.

And then, almost out of nowhere, the waiting ended, but the uncertainty didn’t. I got an email saying that a position for in-person student teaching, which I’d dismissed as an impossibility months ago, was open at Grinnell High School. Plans changed three or four times from there (no one’s fault, things tend to get messy when an inland hurricane devastates the state). Things were so up in the air that I didn’t know what housing the college would provide until the day before I arrived, when I found out it would be an actual house, all to myself. 

A little less than twenty-four hours ago the uncertainty ended when I arrived and moved in, but then the waiting returned. I was under self-isolation until this afternoon, when I got my negative COVID test back, and even now that I can go outside, there isn’t much to do in the two days before teacher-prep begins. I know I shouldn’t complain; an entire house to myself is more than I ever could have asked for. But I still feel a little like the winter caretakers of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining: more space than I need and nothing to do with it. 

I’m glad to have certainty now, I really am, and the waiting will be over before too long. But certainty brings its own curse: once you know what you’re going to do, certain options are closed. Of course, a fifth year as a Grinnell student was never an option, but I’m only beginning to fell nostalgic for college now that I know for sure that I’m doing something different. I nearly cried as I walked around the park where the Cross Country team would have its opening picnic every year, past the dorms where I’d lived and the houses where I’d timidly partied for the past four years. It’s hard seeing it empty, as though everyone who used to be here graduated alongside me and left for good, but I know that it would be harder to see the campus full and alive. If that were the case, odds are I’d slip into the New Student Orientation and be a freshman all over again.

Which is a bizarre thing to want, because I was terrified my whole first semester of college, and nearly paralyzed my first week. I didn’t know if I’d pass my classes or make friends or choose a good major, and as though the immediate problems weren’t enough, I also worried myself sick that I’d never find a good job or love or happiness. But, while I remember all that, I have trouble taking my past self seriously because I have what he doesn’t: certainty. I know that I found passing grades and friends and love and happiness and more at this college. So all I see is what the scared little twerp I used to be had ahead of him, and I envy him for that.

And, if I use the same logic from my past self on my present, I think the real struggle right now is the same one I faced back home: waiting and uncertainty. A shorter wait, sure, and a narrower sort of uncertainty;  I know that I’m going to student teach and I’m fairly sure I’ll be at least decent at it. But it’s less certainty than I had the past three times I came back to this campus, and I miss it. I’ll get past it once work starts up and I get started shaping this new part of my life. In the meantime, I guess I just have to wait.