The Haikus of Time and Perspective

There really is something about the moments before one falls asleep for creative energy.  I was about to slip away last night, but I was kept awake by my troubles, and out of my troubles sprouted a poem.  It was a simple Haiku which, I realized after scratching it out on a notecard, was horribly negative.  So I felt I needed to also compose its opposite.  They’re not really anything special, but I figured I would put them into a blog post, so here they are:

The Haikus of Time and Perspetive

The past so painful,
The future so frightening–
The present so droll.

The past so soothing,
The future so promising–
The present so full.

Violence and Pacifism

As a side note in one of our discussions in my Ethics class, the topic of pacifism was brought up, and our professor suggested that “pacifism is not something we can apply on the political or social level”.  I was surprised, but the class seemed to be in general agreement with this notion.  Of course, I didn’t voice my disagreement, so there could have been others like me, who simply failed to represent the other side, but I noted a wave of non-verbal agreement.

I started wondering about the logic in this claim.  I do believe that we can solve conflict without violence, and I believe in pacifism, but I also see the truth in my professor’s words.  So why is it, that pacifism is not realistic?  Why do we still feel the need to cling to war?

Well, maybe pacifism isn’t socially/politically realistic because we don’t believe that pacifism is realistic.  We don’t believe in pacifism, so when we move toward peace, we still keep our violence tucked away, in case we should ever need it.  And as long as we still have our potential for war, everyone else is going to do the same.

The Cold War was just a dramatic metaphor for the way our world powers interact.  It would be crazy for the United States to disband its military, wouldn’t it?  We would be trampled underfoot!  And so we continue pouring fortunes into our weaponry, while we dream bloated dreams of peace.  And the lowest of us starve and suffer under oppression and misfortune, and we cut funding for schools and social service projects.

We don’t need war to solve problems.  Our famous world-changing figures, like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, teach us that.  So why do we even have war?  Well, the only decent argument for having a strong military in a society that strives for peace–at least that I can think of–is self-defense.  Is that it?  We need war so we’ll be safe from war?  I suppose violence is the world’s biggest self-fulfilling prophecy.

On a Low Bank of Clouds

Disclaimer:

In this story, I am going to imagine heaven.  And along with that, I will indicate some of the ways in which this heaven operates.  It is important to understand the weight I put on the word imagine, because I am, by no means, trying to portray this as the way heaven actually is.  All I know of heaven and the way that heaven operates is from what I have read.  In this story, I do make an effort to stay consistent to these elements, but I also portray them very differently than what is standard.  I hope that you will not find this to be offensive.  I also hope that, if you do, you are able to overlook these details and still be able to appreciate the overall themes.

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On a Low Bank of Clouds

My name is Annie, and I killed myself when I was twenty-five.

I had my reasons, but I’m not going to talk about them right now.  Instead I’m going to talk about what happened after that.

I was kind of expecting to find myself in hell when I first came to, but I didn’t.  It wasn’t heaven either.  It was something of a meadow made of clouds, and there were quite a few other people, of all different sorts, around.  In the middle of the meadow was a courtyard, which served as the beginning to two roads that led off in different directions, one leading up into another set of clouds, and the other leading down into a valley.

There wasn’t anyone facilitating, but somehow we knew our turns.  I had just arrived, so I could tell I had quite a while to wait.  I found a clear spot to sit, off by myself, but suddenly a kid came up to me.  He was tall, with long hair.  He  smiled at me when I looked up at him, but he looked pale and weak, and he seemed to be fighting back a tremble.

“Could I sit here?”

“Uhh, sure,” I said, kind of wishing he wouldn’t.  He sat on the ground, with his arms wrapped around his legs and his head resting on his knee.

“Have you tried it yet?” he asked, after a minute of silence.

“Tried what?”

“To go in.  To heaven.”

“No.  I’m still waiting. I just got here.”  I didn’t really feel like talking, but he kept going.

“Oh.  I just tried.  I had to let them skip me, because I couldn’t make up my mind.”

Now I was curious.  “What do you mean you couldn’t make up your mind?”

“Well, it was my turn, and I went up there, down the heaven road.” His words tumbled over each other, “I figured it would be pretty easy, because I really do love God, and I figured I’d been pretty good and all.  But I started getting close to the door, and I got this feeling.  I realized that He’s there.”  He stopped to think, and to catch his breath.  “Like, it sounds weird, because we always figured He’d be there, but He’s actually there, through that door.  I started feeling it as soon as I got close to the door. It was like light that you see with your emotions.  And as I got closer I could feel His presence, and I could feel my presence.  And against all that light, I was so—horrible.  I was all pride and apathy and, oh,” He stopped for a second, and then picked up again, at his previous pace.  ”And here I was, this horrible thing, about to walk through the door to all that light, and I couldn’t do it.  So I started wondering if maybe I was supposed to take the other road, but at the same time I could tell that He wanted me to go to Him, but I still couldn’t bring myself to do it.  So I had them skip me for a while.  And now, well, I don’t know.”
This didn’t seem right.  “You mean, you get to pick which way you go?”
“Uhh, well, kind of, I guess.”
“So what’s stopping everyone from just picking heaven?”
“Well, we’re stopping ourselves I guess.”
I still was unsure about the whole thing, but I could tell that the kid was too worn out for me to be interrogating him.  I went off to wander, and eventually I found some other people who had also committed suicide.  When they found out how I’d died, they invited me to come with them to watch the world that morning.  I didn’t have anything better to do, and I still had a long wait, so I agreed, and they took me to a low bank of clouds, overlooking the planet.
Looking at the Earth from the Heavens, or at least the outskirts of Heaven, is different than the view from space.  You can still see the planet, but you can see everything in detail: every person, tree, car, animal—everything.  It was amazing, but when I looked over at the people I was with, they all looked miserable.  I didn’t understand why, but I didn’t have the nerve to ask them, so I just watched the planet.  And then I saw it.  Or I felt it, or something.
I saw the people I knew, and I saw what they were feeling.  It was loss and emptiness, anger and sadness; it was unbearable but inescapable.  It was consuming them, and I could tell that it was because of what I’d done.  I didn’t have a problem killing myself, because I didn’t care about myself.  But, really, I was stealing myself from the people who cared about me.  The weight of my suicide hit me, and I was crushed beneath it.  I felt awful for what I’d caused, but I couldn’t offer any remedy.  I took their beloved, and I would not be able to return her.

And then there was something else, too.  It wasn’t worse than the guilt, but it was just as bad.  I saw my friends and family, and I felt their hurt, and I realized why they were hurting.  They were hurting because they loved me.  They loved me!  And, I realized, I loved them.  There was all this love and I threw it all away!  I didn’t think anyone cared about me, because I didn’t care about myself, so I threw my life away.  But all of these people did care about me, and now I had hurt them and I couldn’t take it back.  I could have lived in that love, but I refused to see it until it was too late.

My stomach felt sick, but you don’t throw up in the heavens, so the feeling just lingered in me.  I thought about what the kid had said.  I figured I didn’t even need to try to go into Heaven; I could see from here that I didn’t deserve it.

When my turn came, I took the Other road.  It was long, and wound down the cloudy hills.  I was a ways along when I saw the man, but I think he had been walking by me all along.  When he saw that I noticed him, he looked at me, saying, “I’ll walk you to the door, but you know I can’t go in.”

I didn’t know what to say, so it was quiet for a while, until he spoke again.
“You know my story, Annie.”
“Yeah.” My voice came out all funny.

“You know that I went through all that so you wouldn’t take this road.”

“But.. What I did–” I couldn’t seem to get my thoughts out, but, in retrospect, I don’t think I needed to.

He just stopped and looked at me, and I turned around to look at him.  He held out his hand to me, and I took it.  He led me along the road to Heaven, but when we started getting close, I felt the same thing that the kid was talking about.  I could feel God, and against that feeling, I was this wretched thing.  I felt so sick I fell down.  I wanted to turn back, to just take the other road, but he looked over at me.  “Will you still come through?” he asked.

I felt like He wanted me to come to Him, too, just like the kid had said, but I was so disgusted with myself.  The whole time, while I was on the ground, he held his hand out to me, looking me in the eye.  I felt like he should be looking at me with disgust, but there was only love in his gaze, so I took his hand.  He picked me up, because I couldn’t walk, and carried me toward the gateway.  The feeling was most powerful right at the doorway, and I felt so wretched in comparison that I stopped him.  I started to try to say something, to try to get out of it all, but he spoke first.

“It was worth it, you know.  Everything I went through–it was worth it.”  And he stepped through.

On Success

I have this problem.  When I write, I keep talking about how our value as humans isn’t based on what we do, and in my heart I truly believe that.  Unfortunately, my head is still working on the concept, and it doesn’t always go so well.

This summer has been the product of a conflict of mine.  I don’t really believe in money as motivation, so when I consider an occupation, if the job is not something that has some other source of motivation for me, I feel like I am selling my life away.  I do know that things like paying for college or preparing for the future are things I should be thinking about, too, but I’m convicted by Christ’s story about the lilies and the sparrows, and I don’t want to be taken away from God in an effort to secure my future.  That being said, I don’t want to squander what God has given me.

My compromise for the summer was this: I would work part-time, at a place that would give me the chance to share love, and I would invest the rest of the summer with a few writing projects, and giving myself the opportunity to go where God takes me.  I found a job at an ice-cream and coffee shop in our city’s downtown area, which hosts a variety of small businesses.  I felt good about the fit.  Here I’d be encountering people–something I need to force myself to do–and sharing joy and food, along with supporting a small business.  I was excited.

Well, I was a bit slow to get the hang of the ice-cream business, but I pushed myself and I did my best.  It wasn’t quite enough.  At first I didn’t get very many hours, and then I got fired.

When your brain is still learning not to try and measure your worth based on your deeds, getting fired from what seemed like a simple job, is a bit rough.  Now I’m out of a job, and I feel like I’m lazy.

I responded by trying to rack up other achievements.  I assigned myself to eight hours of ‘productive’ time every day–basically working on writing projects.  But my basis for what was ‘productive’ meant things that could lead to me getting money or fame or something.

My mom’s birthday was about this time.  This spring I started drawing birthday cards for friends, and I planned to give my mom one as well.  They take a long time, because I am not very much of an artist, but I am extremely finicky with my work.

Well, birthday cards make people happy, and they let people know that I love them, but they aren’t going to make me money, and they aren’t going to get me famous, so I didn’t count working on my mom’s card as productive.  So I set my mom’s card as a low priority, because I felt like I had to do something to be worth something.

My mom’s card was more than a week late, and, even though she didn’t mind at all, I felt like a jerk.  Here I’d been trying to avoid selling my life to money, but I somehow managed to do that very thing, even though I didn’t have a job.

I think a lot of the things that we think are important, aren’t very important to God.  And I think that the things that are important to God, don’t necessarily seem important to us.

So maybe if I reevaluate my society-based priority list, or do away with it altogether, I might be better able to hear Him whisper the things that are really important in my ear.

The Cycling Computer

I found myself nearly falling asleep this afternoon, but I have been sleeping in excess lately, so I chose a bike ride over a nap.  I started by riding to the bike store, to ask about clipless petals and helmet-mounted mirrors.  After that I wound a largely residential path, aimed loosely at reaching the bike trails at Legacy Park.  I never made it, but it was not a bad ride, overall.

There is something about biking that detaches me from the concerns of my life, and when I ride I am left with nothing but God, the bicycle, and the beauty around me.  In its ideal form, riding my bike is like meditation or prayer.  Today, however, I messed it up.

I have a cycling computer mounted on my handlebars.  It measures and reports my current speed, my average speed, my distance traveled, and various other bits of information.  Today’s ride would have been better had I just left it off.

Somehow, the measurements consumed me.  I was constantly checking my speed, hoping to improve my average.  I tried to climb each hill in the highest gear possible.  I spent nearly the entire ride thinking about how far I’d go, and thinking about how to tell people how far I rode without revealing what a biking wimp I am.

Today there was God, the bicycle, the beauty around me, and a cycling computer.  My problem was that I only ever saw the cycling computer.

I wonder how God felt about that.  Here He’d finally gotten me to go on a bike ride with Him, and I was so preoccupied with my data that I forgot He was there.

Describing, Rather than Defining

It is probably a fairly common stance, but I’m not a terribly big fan of  categorizing, when it comes to people.  Human beings are like fractals, and even the most descriptive label known to language is only a basic geometric shape in comparison.  When we look at the fractal but only see a simple shape, we miss all of the intricacies.  And when we try to force ourselves or someone else into a geometric mold, we wind up filing away the complexity that makes us unique.

As I wrote earlier, I would be surprised this is an unusual perspective, but, for some reason, categorizing people is still an extremely difficult habit to break. So I’m not writing this to persuade against classifying–I’m assuming it’s pretty clear why we shouldn’t be doing that–but instead to suggest a simple change in language that may help us break out of this habit a bit more.

I suppose this idea began to form out of my trying to avoid racial prejudice.  Terms like “white person” or “black person” or “Hispanic person” have never set well with me.  I know, though, that in the absence of any sort of prejudice, these terms can be used to physically describe a person; similar to if I were describing someone as having blond hair.  Along with trying to avoid being racially prejudicial, I also wanted to avoid irrationally limiting my behavior in fear of being racist.  Because of this, I set out trying to figure out what it was that bothered me about these phrases.

Now, without any sort of stereotypes, calling someone a “white person”  should only indicate that the individual has a skin pigment somewhere between pale and slightly tanned, along with, perhaps, some other physical traits.  Unfortunately, the stereotypes exist, and, whether we believe them or not, by learning the stereotypes, our brains become prone to associating them to the concept as well.

Our typical phrasing trends tend to enhance this stereotype-association process, too.  When we attach an adjective to a noun, it is answering the question “What sort of a noun is it?”.  The problem that arises when we apply this process to people, is that people do not come in sorts; they come hand-crafted, detailed, unique, and individually-wrapped.

After I realized this, I also realized that the concept applied to far more than just skin-color.  When we use a classifying adjective to describe a person, whether it be “conservative”,  “homosexual”, “hispanic”, or any other, that adjective is, in a way, defining that person.  It has a faint dehumanizing effect, too, where our words can reduce a human being into a “goth” or a “criminal” or an “environmentalist”, who is then forced to bear all of the associations surrounding the term, regardless of their accuracy.  These words may only last through the scope of the communication in which they are used, but their implications can be far more potent and much longer lasting.

In terms of human beings, what we ought to describe are the attributes of a person, rather than the person itself.  The phrase “white person” could be adequately substituted with “person with white skin”.  Where, in the first phrase the adjective, “white”, defines the noun, in the second phrase the prepositional phrase, “with white skin”, is simply an attribute of the noun.  In changing this phrase, the adjective shifts from describing the person as a whole to describing an attribute of the person: skin color.

Next time we feel the need to provide some description in regards to a person, let us invest some contemplation toward determining whether we are describing the attributes of the person, or the person overall.  Because, ultimately, we are human beings first, and our fractals are immensely more intricate than any geometric shape.  So instead of trying to define the fractals with the shapes, let’s use the shapes to describe the details of the fractals.