Signs

I'm all about some signs. Like if I'm having a horrible day and suddenly I see a sliver of sunlight in the sky? I think, "WHOA, SNAP. THERE'S YOUR SIGN." I didn't used to think much of them...and then I came to college. And soon, whenever I began to question what it is I wanted to do or how to get from point A to point B, something would happen. Nothing major...no huge explosions or a wizard man appearing in my glass of water or anything. But still, they would make me wonder.

A few days ago I was hit with a DOOZY. The best kind of doozy I could possibly ever encounter. I was running on the trail at Meredith, listening to my Ipod, contemplating my life after this year. I've been feeling really unsteady about that. The excitement is there, but the number of changes that are going to occur have been making me a little tense. I've been wondering if there's even a shot for me up in NYC; I needed to clear my head, so to the trail I went. One ear in my headphones has been shot, so it doesn't work anymore, so my left ear was being serenaded by Ludacris' "My Chick Bad." It was a little gray outside. All of a sudden, I heard this very twangy, but very sweet voice:

"Hi! Hi. HI!"

I about jumped a foot in the air. I looked up...then I looked down. Right beside me, power-walking like there was no tomorrow, was a petite woman with long blond hair, cartilage piercings, extremely taut muscles, and a blue walking suit. Oh, and she almost came up to my shoulders. Did I mention she was petite in every sense of the word?

She admired my Meredith shirt (the one with the shoe on it), and proceeded to tell me that she was stressed out about one of her daughters. Her daughter was a dancer who was nervous about heading to North Carolina School of the Arts to study on a full scholarship and-

"Shut the front door!" It was my turn to freak out. "I went there for acting once! And I loved it! LOVED. IT."

And suddenly I had a walking buddy.

We were walking and talking about how her daughter was so scared to start this new chapter and that all she wanted to do was be a ballet dancer like her 91-year-old great-grandmother who did a dance at church and went down in a split in front of the congregation (she was talking a mile a minute and let me tell you, I was so entertained) and how it would be so easy to do the "practical" thing but that the heart wants what it wants.

The heart wants what it wants. I stopped walking for a moment. There I was,on the trail beside a mother who really could've passed for a college student, sweating like no other, hearing exactly what I needed to hear from a complete stranger. She was so warm and was immediately taken when I said that I was a theatre and English major. I confessed that sometimes it seems like it would be easier to be "practical" and do something like law or even go to grad school, but she immediately shut me up.

"You could never do that."

"Well, why?" I replied, feeling a little insulted at first.

"Well," She said simply with that Southern twang. "It's not what you want to do, honey child. You want to act. It's in your blood like dancing is in my daughter's. And it is just so cool that you want to take a risk and do something like that and if you keep on being smart like you seem to be, you will be just fine."

"Like me," She continued. "I was a nurse for years and delivered lots and lots of babies. But do you know what I wanted to be all along?"

"What?"

"A yoga instructor!" She said with a flourish (ah, so THAT'S how she got those phenom muscles!). "Yes, I did, yes, I did, I did all of those sun salutations and took two hundred and forty hours of training and am now loving my life."

Well how about that?

"I feel like it's a blessing that I met you," She told me. "What a nice walk it's been!"

Really, I felt like picking her up and squeezing the life out of her. I was her blessing? Switch that around, please.

"Whatever you do," She was beginning to run the opposite direction. "Never give up!"

And then it was suddenly sunny on the trail and I felt like I had broken through a million surfaces.