On the Other Hand: The Saga

     It's kind of scary to find myself facing a wide stretch of summer with virtually nothing planned. After four years of endless homework assignments, late-night study sessions, and ludicrously complex carpooling schedules, it's rather difficult to fully take in the implications of having absolutely nothing due--or, more accurately, nothing to do. What makes it even more unsettling is that this isn't how I planned it. I'm not used to leaving myself this open--which is why, originally, I didn't. Until aboua week ago, I'd been anticipating a month away as a counselor at a sleepaway camp. There, I'd rediscover my (rather pathetic) passion for Newcombe. I'd spend the summer comforting homesick 7th grade girls, hanging out with fellow staff members until all hours of the night. Camp is such an underratedly freeing experience...okay, admittedly I'm a tad squeamish whehn confronted with one of the seemingly constant stream of Daddy Long-Legs spiders that determinedly frequent the bunkhouse, but it only takes me, oh, three weeks to muster up the courage to pluck one up by one of its (all too numerous) legs and toss it outside (where it unarguably belongs) as my campers cheer me on, usually chanting something along the lines of "You're bigger than it, right? So if you think about it, it's actually afraid of you!" (useless) or "See, doesn't its leg feel like a stick, just like I told you?" (um, yes, actually, but a stick surrounded by many, many previously wriggling legs protruding from a creepily cartoonesque black dot of a torso). But in general, I love camp--I feel like I grow so much from the experience, from being in a position where my job is to look outside of myself to reach out to my campers, to make their experience fulfilling and memorable, enriching mine in the process.
     But things don't always go as planned. It's something everyone claims to know, but is a lot harder to swallow when it comes to actually applying it to your own life. I'd been planning to use the month or so right after school ended and before school began to get back in shape after a long year of seemingly ceaseless, altogether sedentary, study sessions. In fact, I made good on my plan as soon as I possibly could, seizing a free day before my AP Psychology exam to spend some quality time at the gym. I was so impressed with myself that morning--there I was, 2/3 of the way through AP season (I'd already suffered through AP Calculus and AP English Lit earlier that week) and look at me, already hitting the gym! 2 gym classes, 10 laps in the pool, and one hot shower later, I lay on the floor of my room, screaming and crying as my mom hovered over me. I'd worked myself so hard (and, regrettably, without water--yes, it wasn't the most brilliant of moves) that I had fainted after the shower. Last thing I remembered, I'd been standing outside the bathroom, screaming for my mother after realizing I wasn't quite going to be able to maintain consciousness, and here I was, lying on my bedroom floor, alternately screaming and slipping in and out of consciousness, as my mom hovered over me, her face twisted with worry. It felt, at the time, like a scene straight out of a movie--whoops, a tad too much swooning... who'll whip out the smelling salts?--although it was also remarkably scary. I guess it was a couple minutes later when I calmed down enough to realize that my left hand (spoiler alert: I'm a righty, thank G-d) was throbbing painfully and a quick glance revealed oddly skewed fingers that I just knew implied a broken bone somewhere...

     Turns out my hand was broken, but the x-rays assured the doctor that it was nothing a simple cast couldn't fix and that I'd definitely be up and about in time for camp. And so everything seemed fine...until a follow-up appointment revealed that my bone had surprisingly rotated, and actually, yeah, I would need surgery, a cast for a month, and quite a long stretch of hand therapy, involving my learning to use my hand again. Oh, um, okay. "So, uh, when were you planning on going to camp?" the doctor asked, and I murmured the date, momentarily too shocked to really register the implications of his past tense "were..." He looked at me and slowly shook his head. And then it hit me. Oh. I'm not going to camp. I'll be home all summer. And my only regularly scheduled activity would be... hand therapy. Needless to say, I was pretty frustrated and upset. And then I realized that this latest turn of events would effectively preclude the visit to one of my best friends in another state that I had scheduled and had been looking forward to. Oh. It was all sinking in, and with it, my heart sank. How could this be? I could hardly focus while the doctor explained the surgery and post-op procedures. I couldn't quite believe that my summer slate had been essentially wiped clean in the few seconds it took the doctor to glance at my finger and mutter, "Hmmm, I don't like the way this one's looking..." And then, of course, this doctor had no surgery openings that worked with our schedule, and we scrambled to find another hand surgeon, scoring an appointment only after a sudden miraculous cancellation (the doctor had been booked until June!).

     As I sat in the new doctor's office, watching as my hand was splinted (my fourth splint in about two weeks...) in preparation for the next week's surgery, I fought back tears (for more like the tenth time in those two weeks...). How could this be happening to me, to my summer? As I sat there, feeling sorrier and sorrier for myself, a nurse rolled in a boy who looked about my age. He was strapped into a wheelchair, his head lolling, each of his limbs encased in a splint of some sort. Good Lord. At that moment, I was served a rather overwhelming, if not heaping, dollop of perspective that I'd been sorely lacking. It was way too hard to feel bad for myself, at least while I was in the same room as this boy whose plans for life were gone. I found myself composing a mental list of all the things I had to be thankful for as the nurse continued wrapping my hand. Sappy, perhaps, but the moment really called for it. Here I was depressed about my lack of summer plans? About a temporary one-handed stint? About four weeks in a cast and hand therapy, as this boy sat here, totally unable to respond to the nurse or to his father, who threw a few weak, brave smiles at my own parents.

     And that's when I realized that it's really, truly all about perspective. Life's what you make of it and most of us--well, we've got it pretty good most of the time. And we don't even realize it. I don't really see all the good things I've got going for me until I lose something, until something "bad" happens. And then, it's kind of late. So when my friend came to visit me instead (Yes! She came, for two too-short days...but it was fabulous!) we made a summer bucket list on a giant poster board. It's currently hanging on my closet door, titled "Windows of Opportunity," featuring little checkboxes disguised as windows, and I'm looking forward to doing some interesting things this summer. I'd like to learn a new language by the end of the summer (yes, I'm dreaming big) and get through a list claiming to be the "100 Best Books to Read on a Desert Island" and maybe clean my closet. But my overarching goal is to become a spectator with perspective, to notice the small things, to acknowledge the abundance of goodness that is, thank G-d, life, to point out the good, even the really little things, and to get past the so-called "bad." Because really, thank G-d, I've never really known bad, because even when I think things are bad, they're really someone else's good.

So I'm keeping it real this summer, chilling with my broken hand, and getting an education in perspective. Should be interesting.