High Schoolers at Coffee
Some of us have been through high school by now and remember, almost like it was yesterday, what our brains thought about. The smallest things made up your world, like what that baseball player said to you when he passed by your desk or if your history teacher and english teacher were flirting. From what locker you picked to what backpack you brought your notebooks in, every little thing counted. Every little thing made up the little world that we lived inside.
I am in a time period in life where I have almost complete flexibility about where I work and when I work. It should not surprise you that I work at coffee shops as often as I can. So this is me (pictured here), at one of my two little community coffee shops. As I was working here, one table over was a high school boy and a high school girl grabbing a coffee together, and they were talking so loudly that half the coffee shop likely heard their conversation. And boy, was it a conversation!
You know when you can just tell that a guy is interested? There is not one thing that makes him glaringly obvious, but it is all the little movements and word choices that give him away. It is the way that he forces a laugh when she laughs. It is the way he responds in automated agreement with her opinions. It is the questions he asks about why she hasn't told her dad she broke up with her boyfriend. This guy was so interested. Honestly, I could just stop there. Young LOVE. Now, many of us know that this kind of LOVE is just a drop in the deep ocean of LOVE. But you have to admit, this is where LOVE starts. High school is where most begin to wade into LOVE.
Their conversation centered around college, naturally. She wants to move far away, live where she is one person in a million, and where there is excitement on every block. He wants to stay close to home, know everyone on campus, and keep to himself. She wants to run wild and free. He wants to ground and grow roots. Nothing could be more incompatible than these two in this conversation. He wants to get married and she does not even want to hear the word. But nevertheless, he was still so interested.
LOVE is so innocent in high school. The mind of a high schooler is so small all one can think to ask about LOVE are questions about the tangible. What city do you want to live in? What job do you want after college graduation? Never mind that later we learn relationships based on LOVE require more abstract questions like, can I trust you with my deepest hurts? Or, will you fight to stay together even when all we know is stress? We could say their conversation is ignorant. We could say their conversation is child-ish.
But we also could say that their conversation is MUNDANE. When was the last time you forced a laugh to laugh with someone you care about? It may be simple, MUNDANE even to you, but is it for them? When was the last time you tried to make yourself interested in all the things that interest the someone you care about? It could be boring, it could be MUNDANE. But could it also be thrilling?
Sometimes, adults interacting with LOVE question the feelings before wading into the ocean. We ask ourselves, "what if the LOVE gets colder as I wade deeper?" We ask, "if it gets cold, will I even want to swim?" Maybe something we can learn from the MUNDANE, child-ish, simple conversations of high schoolers is that it may not always be good to ask those questions. It may be better, at times, to do a polar plunge. It may be better to push aside all the facts that misalign and still stay so interested in the potential of LOVE. Because after all, MUNDANE high school LOVE is where it starts. I would argue, this is even a key ingredient to LOVE. How thrilling it is to LOVE in such a MUNDANE way as these two did!
When was the last time you were a high schooler at coffee?
