Compartments

Towards the end of last year I received a board game I had bought on Kickstarter, called “Kindgom Rush: Rift in Time” for those that are interested. When I opened it I was in awe of how many pieces it contained. Now, I should have been expecting it to have a lot of pieces because I’d kept up with the updates by the game designers. The original storage solutions for most games like this are not optimal. They use large boxes with sizeable plastic moulds which leave a lot of space empty and unused. For my birthday my mum gifted me a smaller box with much more usefully sized compartments. Thanks mum.

This got me thinking a bit about life. We have a lot of things in life which we need to make time and space for. Sometimes it feels like we only have so many spaces to put things. Right now, at this very moment we will have what we need to fill some of them. They’ll be the right size and shape, and we’ll instinctively know where they go. These might be things like knowing the foods we like to eat, the sports we like to play, and the things we do on Saturday. Other compartments we will find the right things for over time. Maybe the type of work that suits our expertise and gets us out of bed in the morning, or who we are going to spend our life with. Some compartments will even be empty for a long time, but we will find beautiful things to fill them with eventually. The heart-warming movie that gets us through being sick, people to co-author stories with, or the music that will always get us up on our feet and dancing. Some compartments will be emptied and refilled often. For me, the enthusiasm I feel while watching sports teams I support, through their wins and losses. And yet more compartments will be full of things we don’t need in our lives and we will have to work hard to empty them out.

Life is about figuring out what we want to fill each of the compartments with. Some people find this out early and set about doing it with all their might. Others instinctively know what they want to do but don’t yet have the means to figure out how. If you are one of these people don’t let that stop you from marching step by step towards those goals. It took me almost thirty two years to figure out what it is that can get me out of bed in the morning. I see pain in the world, deep and needless pain. When I struggle with depression I experience it, I know it, I feel it, and for years I was unable to break out of the cycle and see the light which God was placing in front of me.

It has taken a lot of hard work to get to this place, to where I feel comfortable and confident talking about my experience in the hope it will help others. Every day I thank God for being where I am and the amazing people I am blessed to have around me. I thank God for the gifts of writing stories and songs that express this pain I’ve seen and felt in ways I would otherwise be unable to. I often don’t realise at the time, but each story I write, whether it’s a twenty-five hundred word short story or a one hundred and fifty thousand word epic, is an attempt to encourage people to choose kindness. This is something I believe we can all do better, myself most definitely included.

We are all different. It is difficult to embrace the parts of ourselves we’re unsure of, let alone things out in the big wide world that are unfamiliar. Lean into the unknown a little more each day and value the opportunity this provides to learn what we don’t know. And who knows, maybe we’ll even find the things to fill those compartments that we haven’t yet found out what they’re for.

You’re doing good. When you find yourself looking in a mirror I hope you can believe more and more each day that you’ve got gifts to give this world. It’s taken me years to find mine, let alone start to share them, but every step has been well worth it.

Keep on keeping on being awesome. Peace.

Cover photo by Azamat Esenaliev from Pexels.

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