With a New Decade Close at Hand (A Dialogue Between Nashs)

Introduction:  There has been some conflict within the Board of Nash Managment as to what this blog post should entail; however, it is widely agreed upon (save perhaps by Lazy Nash and Self-Doubt Nash) that the upcoming holiday deserves a post (if nothing else, it will maintain my at-least-one-post-per-month pace).  As such, to ensure that each Nash is adequately represented, it has been decided that this post will contain a dialogue between Nashs, in regards to both the nature of this post, as well as the impending 2010’s.  It should be noted, however, that the Board will be conducting this dialogue live, and that it is not prerecorded.  As such, the reader should expect a certain (and, quite possibly, irritating) level of self-reference.  For this we, the Board, heartily apologize (Introspective Nash, however, is not represented by this apology, as self-reference is his primary occupation).

SENTIMENTAL NASH:  To begin, I would very much like to make a short monologue about the holiday, because, as many of you know, I have been developing a great passion in regards to the meaning of this turn in decades, and I would be honored to pour my heart out to the Board.
HERALD OF THE BOARD:  Your Request is granted, Sentimental Nash.
SELF-DOUBT NASH: If I may interject, I feel this post is very stupid–
HERALD OF THE BOARD: You may not Interject, Self-Doubt Nash, please Remain Seated.  Sentimental Nash, please Continue.
SENTIMENTAL NASH: Thank you very much, Harold.  Now, I begin.  Tomorrow, my friends, marks the beginning of not only a new year, but a new decade.  This will be the third decade in which we have existed, and it will be another major portion of our life.  I feel as though we are standing in the fog on the ledge of a great ship, and our port is just out of reach, but there is no telling what this port has in store for us.  As we near this harbor, I have been reflecting on our voyage thus far–specifically through this year.  Now, as you know, this has been quite a year for us.  There have been crushing defeats, heartbreaking tragedies, and great struggles of the soul, and I am thinking, as I reflect upon these events, that they have been leading us to this very point.  They are our conflict, but tomorrow night will be our climax.  Tomorrow night we turn over into a new land, a new harbor, and the defeats of last year will be nothing more than the ocean that brought us here.  Okay.  I think that’s about all I have right up front.  Thank you again, Harold.
HERALD OF THE BOARD: The Table is now open for Discussion.
(SUPPOSEDLY) OBJECTIVE-CRITICAL NASH:  I would like to point out that the “New Years” holiday is purely a social construct, the actual date of which is completely irrelevant.  New Years might as well be on January 2 or even in some other month entirely.  In fact, it would seem to be most appropriate to place the beginning of the new year at such a date so that it coincides with the end of Winter and the beginning of Spring, since, in common human symbolism, Winter is representative of death and Spring of rebirth.
SELF-DOUBT NASH: Yeah like we haven’t heard that proposition before.
(SUPPOSEDLY) OBJECTIVE-CRITICAL NASH: I offer only the truth, trite or not.
SENTIMENTAL NASH: Well, I was just trying to explain that, no matter when New Years should fall, it happens to fall at a critical point in our own life, since it will be the cumulation of a years worth of struggles and personal growth on our part.  Tomorrow night the phoenix dies and by morning it is risen anew!
(SUPPOSEDLY) OBJECTIVE-CRITICAL NASH: Now that assertion is even more ridiculous.  Yes, there have been struggles over the past year, but what reason do we really have to expect this to be their cumulation?  Tomorrow night is just another night.  Tonight is a night.  You didn’t disagree that New Years could fall on any day without problem, so why isn’t tonight the cumulation?  What reason do we have to expect our problems to cumulate tomorrow night?  Surely you don’t believe that we’ll magically stop having struggles after January first?
SENTIMENTAL NASH: Well, no.  It’s just–It isn’t that New Years Eve fixes everything.  It’s just that it helps to remind us that the past is in the past, and that there is hope for the future.  That is why they cumulate with New Years, because we let them cumulate with New Years and that way we can keep on going.
(SUPPOSEDLY) OBJECTIVE-CRITICAL NASH: If we are truly honest with ourselves, would we really need to be reminded of those things?  Could it be, Sentimental Nash, that the reason you are so excited for this holiday is that you need to be reminded and reinspired by this holiday because you allow yourself to succumb to the emotional effects of those past events as well the chill torments of having your warm blanket of dreamy idealism ripped away from you by the brutal hand of reality?
INTROSPECTIVE NASH: I move that we forcibly redirect the flow of this conversation, as it is now representative merely of personality differences.  Since both Sentimental Nash and Objective-Critical Nash are equally unable to conform to the other’s personality without defeating their identities as well as their roles on this Board, our purposes are best served by abandoning our present debate.  Also, Objective-Critical Nash, you’re only going to make Sentimental Nash cry by speaking to him in that manner.  You aren’t going to convince him of anything.
(SUPPOSEDLY) OBJECTIVE-CRITICAL NASH: His tears would only further prove his misguided thinking.
INTROSPECTIVE NASH: Well, your insistence on the superiority of your own mindset only proves the imperfection of your objectivity.
(SUPPOSEDLY) OBJECTIVE-CRITICAL NASH: On the contrary, since said superiority was derived in an objective environment, it is still objective to insist that it is superior, since it is the truth.
HERALD OF THE BOARD: Introspective Nash, your movement for a Redirection has been Accepted.  Are there any other Topics for the Table?
PUBLIC RELATIONS NASH: Yes.  I move that we end the blog post now, because it is becoming quite long–as many of our posts, unfortunately, are–and readers will probably not want to put up with this much reading.  Especially seeing how, erm, well, how abstract and blathery it is.
NON-CONFORMIST NASH: oh so the point of posting on the blog is just to appeal to the readers?  some blog it is then!  we should change the name to “a wanderer’s popularity-contest entry” then, because they’d hardly be honest ponderings.  oh wait, that wouldn’t go over well.  are we just looking for sheer number of readers, PR Nash?  because then we should just change it to “naked celeb pix”.
PUBLIC RELATIONS NASH: I move that we erase the last sentence of Non-Conformist Nash’s previous remark.  Though his “rebellious spirit” will appeal to teenagers and college students, the phrase “naked celeb pix” may very well offend many of our readers.
NON-CONFORMIST NASH: there you go again.  trying to censor me.  objective-critical nash! back me up here, man.  should we really be biasing our blog just to make people happy?
(SUPPOSEDLY) OBJECTIVE-CRITICAL NASH: If this purpose of this post is to be an unbiased, egalitarian expression of each different member of the Board, then it would be hardly egalitarian or unbiased if we were to censor Non-Conformist Nash’s remarks.  Whether or not the phrase “naked celeb pix” is rude is purely subject to interpretation.
PUBLIC RELATIONS NASH: And that interpretation is exactly what I am taking into consideration, OC Nash!
INTROSPECTIVE NASH: Seeing that we have, once again, fallen into another rather circular argument, and that we have strayed quite far from the topic of the New Year, I move that we take a moment for any further thoughts in regards to the new year, and then go ahead and wrap the post up.
HERALD OF THE BOARD: Movement accepted.  Are there any further Thoughts in regards to the upcoming holiday?
SELF-DOUBT NASH: No.  But we aren’t seriously going to post this, are we?
NON-CONFORMIST NASH: yeah.  just be-cause we can.
SELF-DOUBT NASH: Don’t do it. Please. We are going to feel so stupid when we wake up tomorrow and read this.  Don’t you realize that we’re writing this at 1:38 in the morning?  That more than half of this is just introspective blather and is completely unrelated to New Years Eve?
NON-CONFORMIST NASH: well.  the first part is kind of related to new years eve.  and that’s all people are going to read anyway, so we’re good!  but did anyone else feel like introspective nash was kind of running this show?  why did herald listen to everything he said?
PHILOSOPHICAL NASH: Well, he was kind of running this show.  I mean, how else do you think we would exist?

Thanks

Dear God,

Technically, Thanksgiving ended for the Midwest about three hours ago, but, I spent those three hours being harassed by vending machines, scraping ice off of a car, driving home, and cleaning up a hideous amount of canine waste products, and was therefore unable to reflect upon my thankfulness until now.  I did, however, manage to do a great deal of complaining–probably enough to merit its own holiday.  However, I would feel incomplete if I did not take such an opportunity, so I would like to do that now.

I’m not going to order this by priority, so first of all, I would like to thank you for cats.  Never before have I seen an animal be so deliberately obnoxious as Zoey, save perhaps for the squirrels that throw acorns at people from the safety of the treetops.  Thanks for them, too.  Thank you, also, for Don McLean’s “On the Amazon”, Colin Meloy’s “The Bandit Queen”, and for Kimya Dawson, in general, for teaching me that music does not always have to be serious.  On that note, thank you for Beret-wearing Existential man, and Randall Munroe for thinking him up.

I would also like to express my appreciation, amusement, and general slack-jawed awe-strickenness at your handywork in setting up the Earth’s orbit to be just the right balance of variables so that our water molecules would bounce constantly between states, which would, in turn, have them, not only forming a great deal of our ecosystems, but also floating around in the sky, then suddenly falling out of it.  Quite frankly, if this were a planet in a science fiction novel, The Water Cycle would surpass my willing suspension of disbelief.  On that note, we had some fog at school the other day, and I feel like it was just too darn thick to be realistic.  But thanks for making sure that reality stays unrealistic, just to keep us from getting too level-headed.

Thank you for 3/4 time.

I also appreciate the night time.  I would guess, rather astutely (just like anything else I think or say), that you put some sort of spell over it, or a perfume of sorts, that, when inhaled, causes us to become so silly that we laugh at all sorts of things, and finally let our guards down enough to open our hearts to one another.  Thank you for the majestic stillness of the nocturnal air, as well as its mystery and wonder.  I suppose that’s another thing I should be grateful for about cats: they don’t mind getting up and hanging out with me in the middle of the night.  It’s nice to have that kind of company.

Thank you for that paradox which we call Love; the bargain in which we gain through the gains of others, and they through ours.  Somehow you managed to code a blatant infinite-loop error into the Universe without causing it to crash–maybe that is why we are still going.

As much as sometimes I do not appreciate it, thank you, and this Love, for every time it viciously massacres its way through our bubble-wrap worlds and reminds us that so many of our loved ones are suffering horribly, that so many of our brothers and sisters had barely anything to eat today, while we feasted on all sorts of wonderful foods.  It’s painful contrast, God; I won’t lie to you, but I appreciate it ever so much, because that is Love and I could ask for nothing more.

Thank you also for the dream of your Kingdom, which takes these painful realizations and uses them to set us into motion, giving us the hope we need to survive such truth without being drowned in discouragement, because, with you, we can help bring the beauty of your Kingdom into Earth, and truly live out that Love.

I have a question.  Do plants ever get bored, not being able to move and all?  I sure hope not, but either way I appreciate them, especially seeing how much of my survival depends on them.  But I also think that they are quite lovely, like little cities built up all around us.  I used to watch the bugs fly around, like little spaceships in some crazy, science-fiction metropolis, taking off from the launch pad on one flower-building and soaring neatly onto another (or clumsily, in the case of june-bugs).

Thank you also for my ridiculously generous and loving family who not only understood (mostly) when I ditched them to visit a friend over Thanksgiving, but left me with a huge container full of my favorite food in all of my extremely limited frame of past experiences, Vegetarian Divine Runzas.

Thank you for limericks, God, for showing us that poetry doesn’t always have to be serious, either (though, really, limerick is a very rigid form of poetry).  The same goes for made-up words.

It may be materialistic of me, but thank you for dice, harmonicas, cards, writing utensils, and small pads of paper.  There are so many things that pack almost infinite entertainment value into a tiny object, and I appreciate them immensely.

And thank you so much for music.  Really, I don’t understand what is so appealing about creating patterns in sound vibrations, and layering the waves to fit together neatly (or just a bit off of neatly), but, for whatever reason, it seems to be the only way that I allow certain parts of my soul to escape their tangible anchors.

Finally, thank you for the all things I don’t understand.  It is wonderful to be so much smaller than the Universe.  Whenever Christmas comes around, I always find myself imagining what it would be like to be the size of an ornament, to get to climb around through the tree.  I would be surrounded by the giant green needles and outstretched bark branches.  I would visit the lights and find them to be giant, illuminating the entire area around me in red, yellow, blue, or green.  The tree would be my fortress, my city, my own little world of adventure.

Well, God, I am smaller than ever, and the Universe is my Christmas tree.  Please don’t let me take it for anything less, because, really, it is so much more wonderful even than that.

What it is like, to Love

I realized tonight that I don’t love all people as much as once I thought I did.  At least, I don’t love them nearly as much as I ought to, nearly as much as they deserve.  Honestly, I don’t think I could handle it, but I still believe there is a way, and I still believe that it is something for me to always strive toward.

I started learning about love from my church, and it was there that I came to believe that love, without restraint or requirement, is the force we need to heal the world.  I learned about another level to this love from my friends at college.  These friends are my family (my family still is, too, though my sister argues that I don’t come home enough), and even when I go crazy and try to push them away, they don’t let me.  I’m glad they don’t.  But I’ve been learning what it is like to really love people with these friends, and, quite frankly, I am pretty lousy at it.  But, if nothing else, I have been learning.

Tonight my friends are in The Pit.  At this point in the evening, most of them have been working in the theatre for 13 hours, and, according to one of their estimates, many of them have another four to five hours to go.  And tomorrow they start another ten hour shift at 9 a.m.–after 3-4 hours of sleep.  I’m not involved in the theatre, but I hate show week, because of what it does to my friends.  It is so hard for me to sit here, with only a few writing assignments to work on, while my family is working away for hours and hours, and I all I can do is pray.

This is why it occurs to me that I do not love all people, because my Family is always in The Pit somewhere.  For many of the members of my Family, these working conditions are a fact of life; many of the members of my Family are in worse conditions–starving, freezing, sick, forced into war or prostitution or slavery–but my heart does not ache endlessly for them, because I am so distanced from their struggles.

This is why this Love is so important, because without Love our hearts cannot span the distance, the thick bubble-wrap walls that keep us from knowing the pain that fuels our comfortable lives.  Without the Love, we are neglecting our Family, and we are incomplete.

So, as much as I hate to feel the way I do now for even a week, Lord, teach me to really love.

Characters

This has been a very psychologically trying semester for me, and I realized that this struggle has been bleeding into my writing.  I’m in Advanced Composition, which is an extremely open-ended writing class–though it is still my most challenging so far, perhaps for this very reason.  So far I have produced three different writings: a short story, which is, by itself the longest piece I have ever written, a short play, and a narrative poem.  The writings are completely separate in terms of plot and characters, but there are subtle ways in which they depend on each other and interconnect, so I am inclined to include them in the same collection.  I was imagining this collection to be heading toward some cumulative point, until Wednesday.  On Wednesday I realized what my writings really were.  They are partial psychological profiles of myself.

It just so happened that in Advanced Comp. on Wednesday we were asked to write a short piece that develops one of our characters.  Mine is probably a bit shorter than the requirement, but I don’t think I’m going to add much more to it, and I think I will use this as the introduction / preface to my collection.

Confessions and Regrets

~

It is through situations that we best see into the souls of characters; it is through characters that we best see into the souls of their authors.

~

Y’san in the Market

The marketplace stirred like the clouds of dust that follow the hooves of horses, but Y’san drifted about like an autumn leaf in slow descent.  Ahead of him, two children tossed a stone back and forth between one another.  When a failed toss left the stone at Y’san’s feet, the old man smiled at the children, picking up the stone, and returned it, nodding in respect to the child’s gratitude.

“Rolls today, Y’san?” hollered Pedro as the elder approached his bakery stand.

“Yes, please.  Six coppers, correct?” Y’san replied, once he had finished walking to the booth.

“Six coppers.  Here you are.” Pedro handed Y’san a basket of rolls.

“Thank you much, Pedro.  And your coppers.”

Pedro took the coins and crooked his head.  Just as Y’san was about to turn to leave, Pedro blurted, “Hey, we’re getting together for cards tonight—you should come join us!”

“No, no,” said Y’san, “I’m much too old for that.”

“Nonsense!  You know that some of the finest cardsmen are the elders!  And I’ve heard stories about when you used to play.  Join us!  It will be a good time.”

“Oh, no, no.”  Y’san smiled, shaking his head slowly, and walked away.  That night, the elder watched the wind blow through the ferns and imagined the jokes and stories that would be shared over that game of cards.

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.

~~~~

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.