Apparently, I did anyway.
Over the past several weeks, certain words have stopped me in my tracks—some old, some obscure, some familiar but carrying histories I had never really considered.
Septennium. 7/31
Vicissitude. 8/3
Serein. 8/6
Invidious. 8/20
Pandemonium. 8/27
Ambivalence. 7/29
That is a strange little vocabulary list. In some ways bizarre that they grabbed me- it's not like I was reading a dictionary!
I have written about most of them separately, without much thought that they belonged together. One came from reading. Another surfaced while thinking about getting older. Another helped me describe something I had experienced in leadership but never quite had a word for. Pandemonium sent me back to Milton and then forward again into the way a magnificent literary word eventually became our ordinary description for chaos.
But now, as August comes to an end, I wonder if the words were having a conversation with each other before I realized I was listening.
Maybe they even tell a story.
Septennium is about time.
Seven years. A measurement that seems arbitrary until you begin dividing a life by it. Childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, marriage, children, career, middle age, grandchildren—life somehow becomes easier to see when we stop measuring it only in birthdays and start noticing its seasons.
But time never stands still.
That brings me to vicissitude.
Life turns.
The word comes from the idea of succession and changing circumstances—the rising and falling, gaining and losing, arriving and departing that constitute an ordinary human life. We spend an enormous amount of energy trying to establish permanence in a world that stubbornly refuses to provide it.
Jobs change. Bodies change. Families change. Friendships change. Institutions change. Dreams change.
And yet God does not.
Perhaps that is why His immutability has become more precious to me as I have grown older. When almost everything else is subject to vicissitude, there is profound comfort in knowing that the One holding the story is not.
Then there is ambivalence.
I used to think ambivalence meant that you couldn't make up your mind.
I don't anymore. Sometimes ambivalence is simply what happens when you have lived long enough to discover that two apparently contradictory things can both be true.
I can miss an earlier season of life without wanting to return to it. I can celebrate getting older and occasionally mourn being young.
Perhaps maturity is not finally resolving all those tensions. Perhaps it is learning to carry them faithfully.
Which brings me to invidious.
After years in leadership, I finally found a word for a particular kind of burden: those circumstances where no available choice leaves everyone satisfied. Sometimes every wire on the bomb looks important, but eventually somebody has to decide whether to clip the green one or the yellow one.
And if nothing explodes, most people will never know there was a bomb.
That is part of leadership, but it is also part of life.
I found out today- that particular post will be published in a CESA journal... look for ward to seeing it.
Wisdom does not always reveal the painless choice. Sometimes it simply gives us enough courage to make the necessary one and enough humility to live with its consequences.
Put enough of those decisions together, add deadlines, personalities, disappointments, responsibilities, surprises, failures, victories, traffic, bills, football games, family schedules, national news and whatever happened before breakfast—and eventually we arrive at another wonderful word:
Pandemonium.
Milton coined it as the capital of Hell in Paradise Lost—the place of all demons.
We turned it into a word for Tuesday morning.
There is something almost humorous about that linguistic journey, but perhaps something revealing as well. Human life can feel chaotic. Sometimes spectacularly so.
We would like the story to move neatly from Point A to Point B.
Instead, there are interruptions, reversals, detours and circumstances we never saw coming.
Septenniums filled with vicissitudes.
Vicissitudes producing ambivalence.
Ambivalence complicated by invidious choices.
All of it occasionally descending into pandemonium.
That would be a rather depressing vocabulary lesson if there weren't one word left.
Serein.
A gentle rain falling from what appears to be a clear evening sky.
Of all the words that found me this month, perhaps that is the one I want to keep closest.
Because grace often feels like serein. It arrives where circumstances don't seem capable of producing it.
And perhaps that is the connection I was looking for without knowing I was looking for one.
Life is not meant to be mastered.
We move through its septenniums and endure its vicissitudes. We learn to live honestly with ambivalence. We make invidious decisions when responsibility requires them. Occasionally we look around and wonder how everything became pandemonium.
But above all of it remains the God who does not change.
The same God who has been faithful in every season behind us is already present in every season ahead.
I don't know what words will find me next month.
I suspect there will be more turns. There will certainly be decisions. There may even be a little pandemonium.
But after sixty-two years, I am becoming less interested in demanding a clear sky.
I am learning instead to watch for the rain.
Sometimes grace falls like serein.
Note: all of this spilled over into my music as well
Check it out sometime: Jayopsis on SoundCloud
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