The Path I'm Going Down

Amid my parents' questions of my maturity and readiness to deal with life, I long simply to sprint off in a direction that has been becoming increasingly clear to me through the voices of writers both near and long since gone. It has been almost half a year since my heart to heart with God in the Ford fountain, but the cryptic words of that night keep coming back to me: "Wait and listen and the road will make itself known."

Yeah, you try explaining that to your parents and see what they say. Some things are simply beyond explanation. You have to see it, to hear it, to understand.

Over this brief break from academia, one idea has keep coming back to m

e again and again. The idea of true education. The fact that what we know is only loosely tied to such publicly acceptable institutions as colleges. How little knowledge of truly great importance is taught between those oft hallowed halls frightens me. Of course I know very little and my knowledge is admittedly quite meager, but this fact does not frighten me. What frightens me is those who claim to have vast knowledge of the world and all that is in it (which is an ostentatious claim at any age).

What has happened to travel as education? Why is someone who wanders through Roman ruins for several months, talking to tour guides and seeing the places where great events occurred, put on lower footing then someone who studies the contributions of the Romans in a college? Why is it more important to know about different economy academically then to talk to people in countries with different economies in person? Why is the piece of paper all that matters?

What is it that we learn in college that makes us better then someone with a little bit of real experiences (work or otherwise) under our belts?

But again, I digress into the college thing...

I guess, ultimately, I just want the chance to experience the world more fully and give that experience to others as well. Not everyone can pay for a full semester's education just to receive 3-12 hrs of credits while studying abroad (which are the main options I've observed in colleges). I want to share the world with my friends by giving them an intimate knowledge of it in the only way that such knowledge can be gained: by seeing it and experiencing it in its full beauty and ugliness, its diversities and similarities.

I want to give this generation a chance to possess the world. (Buddhist arguments about reality and possessing anything aside.) As I once read, you possess only what you know. We must know the world, that we may truly come to be, as a generation, the ones who take ownership over this great place where we live and all the influences that have made us who we are. In short, I want our generation to take ownership of ourselves, fully and completely.

Can we afford to accept anything less from life?

Song of the Open Road by Walt Whitman (part 15)

Allons! the road is before us!

It is safe--I have tried it--my own feet have tried it well--be not detain'd!

Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen'd!

Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn'd!

Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!

Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money,

I give you myself before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself. will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Condensed Dreams

Today has been one of those days where for no particular reason I just felt off. Off isn't always a bad thing, but it can so easily go bad that many consider it synonymous with having a bad day. Today wasn't quite bad though.

Today felt like stepping outside of me and seeing all that I am and am trying to be without shields or pretenses. It's a scary feeling.

I decided to go down to Columbus to keep my mind off of it. Still, while I was trying on clothes in a store I saw a thin, almost pretty girl looking back at me in the mirror. Can she do all that I aspire to do? Whatever it is that I aspire to do? There is so much for me to do, and so little me. I don't know where to start.

I feel like I'm in a cloud, trying to find a way to condense my dreams.

Thoughts of an Insomniac

It was 2:30 when I realized that sleep wasn't going to happen, not for a while anyway. Too much is going on in my head, so I resort to facebook, where a friend's post actually reminded me that I've been neglecting the blog. So here I am, it's going on 3 am, I'm wondering how to make some coherent since of all these thoughts that keep flashing through my head and downloading Euro-pop.

My granddad is in the hospital now for a blood clot that somehow came up on the x-rays despite the fact that he is on blood thinners. When I see him I still think of sitting on the arm of his giant lazy boy when I was little and staying up way past my bed time to see if the Braves would win the game. Most of the time I didn't even stay awake until the end of the game, but I guess who won didn't matter as much as actually watching the game anyway.

He's worried about me and the fact that I'm not in college and that my lack of diploma will keep me from opportunities. I want to allay his concerns, but with my actual writing projects going so slowly, and my greatest job triumph over the past few months being that I am quote "Manager material," I wouldn't even know where to start. I'm not worried about my future. I know that whatever I do will work out, one way or another, and that if I work hard I'll do alright. (I expect way more of myself then alright, but we won't go into that right now.)

I don't like people worrying about me though. It feels weird somehow. And honestly I don't worry too much about most people I know. I like to talk to them, and I try to be helpful/supportive, but whether they succeed or fail is up to them and their efforts. We are only supporting characters in each other's lives, but we are each the star of our own world.

We each take the stage and play the part that we choose for ourselves. I refuse to let my story be anything but what I shape it to be. My life, my story, is and will continue to be a story of victory over my own life. Some craziness gets thrown in on me every now in then, but I am determined to shape it, so that it will not shape me.

Funny even as I say that, I can't help but picture a cartoon version of me (basically shorter with brighter colors) trying to push a giant globe. I guess that's how I feel some days. I'm too small to move the world on my own, but I'm too hard headed not to try. I like to think that maybe God will help, but my personal theory on God is that he makes things happen primarily when hope and strength are at their breaking points, like a scientist only adjusting a pendulum when it is hit so hard that it will soon fall off of what holds it aloft. Maybe that's a sacrilegious idea, but it seems to fit.

From out of nowhere, I recall a quote that seems to fit my mood: "Today is the first day of the rest of our lives." That it is. Will I be make it in the big bad world? Probably. Will I be hugely successful and do great things? Maybe. Will I meet my own ridiculously high expectations of myself? Ha ha. I'm not even entirely sure that's possible, but you can bet that I'm going to try. I will drive myself to achieve feats that I know need to be achieved because I know that some feats need to be achieved.

A guy once asked me what my story was, (and I don't know if you are reading this now, but) here is the real answer:

I saw that some things needed to be done in the world, so I decided that I would do them. Even though I'm only a small person, I have to try.

In the meantime, I really should try to sleep. Apparently it is supposed to be good for you. Who knew?

***(Note to my grammatically inclined friends: Yes, I know that I probably have a ton and a half of run on sentences in this post, but at 4 am I couldn't care less.)***

Home

I had Tuesday off from work and the day couldn't have been more needed. There comes a point when you start to not just know that you have limits, but you see them and feel them. They stretch when you push against them like a thin rubber layer surrounding you. Over the last week or two I've been driving full force into them.

On Tuesday, I started to wonder if they would break. For all my efforts to reach out and make myself better I suddenly found myself feeling totally exposed. All of me seemed, in my eyes, to be on display for the world to see. Every decision, every fault, every part of my life that I haven't quite figured out what to do with yet.

In need of somewhere safe to go I turned to what has oddly become my comfort zone: travel. I went to Atlanta and explored the malls, but with the exception of a really awesome chair store there was nothing really worth note. Even the software in the apple store seemed oddly unappealing. It was late in the day when I headed to Rome. The open highway was nice and getting to surprise Scott was even better. That night I discovered a comfort zone that I didn't realize I had left at Berry, my friends. I knew they were there, but to sit down and to actually just be able to enjoy people's company without imposing on their time or having "something that we need to talk about" turned out to be something that I need.

Now, I've never been home sick, and you couldn't pay me enough to want to go back to school, but when I sat down and played a round of BS with Kaitlin, Scott and the others in Krannert it felt like home. I was more at home in that moment then I've probably been the whole time at home.

I guess the old adage is true when it says that it is the people who make the home.

I am still going to go out and stretch my boundaries, and knowing me I will eventually stretch them too far, but now I know where I feel at home.

My meditation room is behind the steering wheel.

My bedroom is wherever I may wake-up in peace.

My dining room is on a beat-up couch in a student center.

My home is wherever I am where I have friends that accept me as is and allow me to accept them for all that they are, and all that they can be.

I once told a man that I wanted to live a life without regrets. I still do. In the meantime though, it is good to know where home is.

Parallels...

Yesterday I was so sick that for most of the day speaking seemed like a luxury that I could not afford.  In the sleepless hours of the night, when I could not sleep for coughing and needing to blow my nose yet again,  my mind began to race over a hundred ideas that lay buried just beneath the surface of my consciousness on a normal day.  I know what I have to do, but a voice deep within seems to cry with the knowledge that the messenger is almost always the one who gets shot.

Is it any surprise that a night like that gave birth to a day like today, where suddenly I had no greater desire then to accomplish my insignificant projects that I still hope will build into something greater?  

Even recovering as I was, it seemed so worth while to stand in the heat of the blazing sun to hear the thoughts of a few people who I deeply respect, not because of what anyone says about them, but because of what no one can say about them.  It is strange to find that I miss hearing the thoughts of people who aren't afraid -- like I wish I wasn't afraid -- of what people think of them.  In their jokes and suggestions they seemed to justify all that I am aiming for right now.  They are not great people by most measures of greatness, but their lack of pretensions is refreshing.  

One more thing occurred to me last night.  A parallel between a speech made in Atlas Shrugged and a debate on tv about how the proposed health care plan would affect small businesses:

"This is the age of the common man, they tell us -- a title which any man may claim to the extent of such distinction as he has managed not to achieve.  He will rise to a rank of nobility by means of the effort he has failed to make, he well be honored for such virtue as he has not displayed, and he will be paid for the goods which he did not produce.  But we -- we who who must atone for the guilt of ability -- we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward.  Since we have more to contribute, we will have the least to say."

Even as I reconsider the passage, I recall hearing a man who owned a company of no more then a hundred employees saying that businesses like his were not considered because he didn't have a lobbyist working for him.  These small businesses don't have men in Washington.  Just the representatives who they hoped would remember that these small employers "pay 44% of total U.S. private payroll" and "have generated 64% of net new jobs over the past 15 years."  I remember also how my dad sat and ranted yesterday about how Obama is doing this as someone with no understanding of the great crime he is attempting to commit because the man has never held a non-government job with the exception of a single professor's position in which he used  to mangle the constitution in front of classrooms full of students.

Is this the future that we were told to look forward to?  I cannot believe that this mockery he is making of the democratic process in a capitalist country will be allowed to go on.  I cannot believe that this is, and should be, the end result of years of "higher learning."  Such a thought seems inconceivable,  yet here we are with our paper degrees proud of what we know, while the philosophers sit on street corners and engineering minds flip burgers because they could not put up with the most terrible lie of all.  The lie that only those who never participate in any truly hard work within the material realm can believe with full conviction.  The lie that school, as it is now, is made to educate.  

Those columns that were once made of marble are plaster now, my friends.  The ivory halls are a facade, and unless you missed it, the gate of opportunity closed before we even arrived.  All these institutions seem capable of doing now is indoctrinating young people with flawed ideals and handing out those pieces of paper that undeniably prove that they can put up with whatever B.S. is thrown at them for at least 4 years.

Sorry for the tangent to education again though.  I guess it still irks me that I've learned more about business, health, finance, philosophy and psychology in my stolen moments away from "education" then I ever did in class.  (And to head of any comments on this last sentence, I read books like a fish drinks water when I'm not in school.)  I dunno...  I guess it works for some people... somehow...  We'll blame my A.D.D. that I don't understand how, at least for now.