A friend sent me an e-mail the other day asking if I could get the senior class involved in a service organization. Bad timing, I thought, glancing over the message. I shot back a reply, “too busy right now, I’ll get back to you when we’re done with planning homecoming.” Skimming the rest of my emails, my head buzzed with tired thoughts: dance in an hour, finish the English essay, fill out college application, call mom . . . I rose to my feet and with forced enthusiasm, returned to work.

Checking my e-mail again the following day, I scrolled through the various messages searching for an important reminder and came across the inquiry about the service project. I reopened it to read it more carefully. It was about an organization to help raise money for victims in Darfur displaced by the genocide. It was sent to me a day ago and now it was at the bottom of my list of emails. Between the time I had opened and then reopened the message, I had attended dance class, written a four-paragraph essay for English, studied for a quiz on enzymes in Biology, ordered the senior class t-shirts, gone to school for seven hours and picked out decorations for the homecoming dance. But what had happened in Darfur?

Have you ever seen one of those “zoom” books that begins with a large picture and focuses in tighter and tighter on a smaller image? Perhaps it begins with a pretty lady lying on the beach, reading a magazine, and from one page to the next, the image zooms into a final picture of a goldfish swimming around a glass fish bowl in a dentist’s office. And if you were to flip from the first page to the last, it would be nearly impossible to comprehend how the fish came about. Sometimes I feel like that goldfish. 

I try to read the newspaper daily, at least the front page. I want to know what’s going on in the world. I like being able to understand and discuss the issues, maybe even devise some sort of trivial scheme to solve them. But often I forget a day, too busy I think, or perhaps I am distracted. I overlook what’s on the news and a day later I tune in to see that more humans have died, maybe thousands of miles a way, or maybe even down the street. But even those accidents that occur in our own neighborhood, people seem to forget, because it’s too easy: too easy to press another button on the remote control or leave the newspaper folded and it’s as if nothing had ever happened. After all, such disasters are pages away in this book of mine.

Adolescence, they say, is about finding one’s place, defining oneself. I feel pretty comfortable where I am now. Despite some exhausting work, I manage to enjoy whatever it is I am doing. This fish bowl isn’t so bad. But I cannot help wondering where the fish fits into this story and I know I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being given hints in a 50-word email I barely have time to read. I’ll figure it out later though, at least after I finish those college applications.