on fear (and love)

I stumbled across this lovely photograph of the Obama's a few seconds ago. (Source here). I suppose I wanted to share it for a lot of reasons.

I guess it is because I have spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about family. And about marriage. And about what, at the age of twenty-one, it really means to me.

My greatest hope is that I will one day find out---but only through acting it out myself, only through being a wife, being a mother, being a part of a little family of my own.

But that is a long way off---really, a very a long way off. And I am okay with that. But it doesn't mean I will stop praying (in the own little way I have---with wishes and deeds and offering nature a little helping hand) for the things that foreground it. For the things that, right now, are troubling or worrying or casting the tiniest little doubts across the horizon. You see, for all the things I have been worrying about lately*, there is the highest of chances that they will pan out alright---and if they do, I will consider myself the luckiest, the most blessed---but there is, underlying, the tiniest chance that they just might not. I guess it is that chance, that lesser chance, that is making life feel a little harder, a little scarier, and a lot less relaxed. Because even though the moment, the moment that I feel it all depends on---though probably doesn't---is a long way off---months, in fact---I feel like I am waiting, just in case.

But I am hoping everything really will be okay. Because the thing I am hoping for is truly worth it---something, in fact, that I believe will shape and change and better the world. (I have never believed in anything so whole-heartedly; I have never wanted to devote myself so much to one thing).

Please, world?

*I am sorry so many of my posts have been made up of worry---and I am sorry, too, to be quite so cryptic. I guess I am still not ready to reveal everything about myself just yet. One day, maybe.