I don’t think that it is possible for me to know what I want to do right now.
I also think that I’m expected to know what to do right now.
So how does one resolve this?
A few months ago, my friends and I were all homeless, I was kicked out of the dorms rather abruptly after the graduation ceremonies and I moved in with a buddy who lives in a loft over the square in San Marcos. I jumped between his place and my friend’s house who was waiting to go off to law school. Well, it wasn’t really his house, it was his grandmother’s and they were attempting to sell it.
It felt like we were in the show Arrested Development where Michael Bluth and his son live in the rent house and have to clean it up every day for showings. So each morning we would arrange the pillows, throw our stuff in the closet and clean up the bathrooms. At nights we would sit out on granny’s porch and drink whiskey and talk about ends and beginnings.
It was one of these nights with the locusts loud in the trees and the slow fan above us casting moving shadows that I was listening to my friend talk about his uncertainty and fear of what was to come. He wasn’t sure if his girlfriend was coming with him to law school or not plus a myriad of other questions we have when in the midst of a transition. It was this night that I had Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet with me. I had studied the book intensely during my time in Spain and I read him this:
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train your for that - but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don’t hate anything.
It seemed to do him a bit of good. I just talked to him a few days ago and he is settled on the east coast and doing well.
Now it is I who must turn to Rilke. I’m home without a vehicle, I feel crowded and I lack direction. I’m interviewing for a job right now and planning on taking it, but another opportunity came up just yesterday and I wonder if I’m supposed to go in that direction. Or neither. I’ve got a lot of questions.
I don’t feel like it’s possible to know what I want to do right now. I’ve no experience that could prepare me. Yet it seems like I’m expected to. I also greatly fear making the wrong decision. What happens if things become difficult and I’m not happy?
Once again, Rilke’s words come to aid:
Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
So I suppose the question would be:
Is the decision to take one job over the other what is difficult?
Or
Is the decision to take neither what is difficult?
And which difficult is the difficult I should be chasing after?
Either way, things are difficult and I have questions. Without a doubt, I am in a time of transition, things are changing and morphing and that is never easy. It’s like I know something big is going on where I came from and there has to be something big going on where I’m headed, but it feels as if nothing big, important, or significant is happening right now and I have no idea how to cope.
I feel as if Rilke would say that this time of transition and hurt is necessary, is essential:
…you, in the midst of the holiday, are bearing your solitude more heavily than usual. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy. . . . But perhaps these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring. But that must not confuse you. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.
I am trying desperately to love the questions them selves, to turn to what is difficult and to bear my solitude.
It is a lightless path I walk on that is quite silent and lonely. I think that resolve comes, not in the form of resolve at all, but by inching forward and straining to see.
technorati tags: Difficult, Solitude, Questions, Granny’s, Transition,
For those interested, I’ve posted my last post over at my Presidential blog, Bobcat Whisperer. I kept the blog this year as Student Body President. Though you might not care about Texas State University, I shared some thoughts from this year that run pretty parallel with what I do here at Good Pancreas.
technorati tags: Adieu, Leaving, ASG, Texas State University, Growth
Often times Christians think that we have a get out of jail free card simply because we believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. Sometimes it feels like we use God’s patience and graciousness as an excuse for being less than stellar. I find myself frequently thinking that Christians believe we get to suck at life because we think we’re going to heaven anyway.
You see examples every day of Christian music that sucks, stupid TV stations that suck, of lame Christian publications that are rip offs of something already created, of mediocre Christian stores selling mediocre things that suck, of Churches that suck, of people that suck- people who don’t think about being excellent or worry about growing because we believe that our faith in Christ is enough.
To illustrate my point I now turn to Batman:
In Batman Begins Bruce Wayne is confronted by his childhood sweetheart, Rachel Dawes after attempting to flaunt his playboy status and making a fool of himself. Rachel looks disappointingly at him and says, “Deep down you may still be that same great kid you used to be. But it’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you.”
So, good for us Christians who believe in God underneath, good that we have a quiet time and believe what the Bible says. But what kind of representation are we to the world if what we do sucks? We are called to excellence, not to ministry. Doing things excellent is ministry. The strongest kind. St. Francis said it, “Preach the Gospel every day, when necessary use words.” What we do is our ministry. Period.
We are commissioned to employ the things that Christ gives us underneath in our every day lives. Technically, if we are literally dying to ourselves every day, we should have an advantage. But too many times to we see failed initiatives and poor organization among the followers of Christ.
Why do you think we had to create Christian TV, radio stations, schools or rip-offs of MySpace called MyPraize (yes, with a “z”) that REALLY SUCK? Because we weren’t good enough to hang. We couldn’t keep speed with our culture and we were too soft and compromised too often. We fell behind.
So, we had to have a presence somehow and instead of stepping up and disciplining ourselves and meeting the existing bar or keeping pace, we just set our own bar a few feet shorter to make ourselves feel better. We’ve cheated.
We have settled for an existence and a reputation of cowardice, mediocrity, a lack of discipline, laziness and unoriginality. We have accepted a place in the shallow end of the pool, on the safe side of the battle.
I don’t know what else to say besides I’m ready to change. I’m ready to set the pace. Not so we can say, “The people that believe in God are on top again!” I’m ready because we have all been given the ability to be excellent in our own way. It’s just time to stop jacking around. I don’t want to suck anymore. I don’t want to be a part of a lame group of people. Because we serve an awesome God, the end.
technorati tags: Christianity, Laziness, Change, Excellence, Greatness, Sucking, Responsibility
I sleep ten inches away from my roommate on an old twin mattress and our room smells like whale piss.
I left my off campus apartment when I was elected Student Body President last April and moved back into the dorms in order to live more closely to the students which I pledged to serve. I chose a freshman roommate with the desire of influencing a young Bobcat, with the hopes of being a good roll model for a new life journey.
I didn’t have a positive freshman year at Texas State University because I followed my high school girlfriend to college and we made no friends and had no investment into our surroundings. We felt no sense of place. I feel like my decision to move back on campus was made partly to reclaim the freshman year I feel like I lost, to be new again and to live in a state of new curiosity and unhindered adventure.
I wanted to go back in time.
As my time as an undergraduate is waning (six weeks left…) I’m feeling the same terrifying feelings that I felt in high school and I’m experiencing the same plague of self evaluation – did I spend my time right? Did I make the most of every day?
It was this afternoon after I finished a bike ride when I came back to the dorm to find my roommate with four of his friends hanging out in our room that I realized all of this. It was this afternoon as they joked about what happened over their Christmas break that I realized that I am not a freshman. I am not 18. I am about to graduate. I am the Student Body President. I cannot take the afternoon off whenever I want. I have loans that are looming over my head in roughly six months. I have to leave.
I’m realizing that this is not bad.
But it is different.
Without even meaning to, I tailored this year to be a hook that I tossed desperately into the past hoping to catch something to keep me there. I have been looking for solutions on ground that I’ve already walked upon and I have feared the path ahead so intensely that I have attempted to stunt my own growth in order to stay there. I camouflaged my intentions with noble plans of being a mentor to the younger men I live with. I told myself I was doing this to put myself in a place where I could live intentionally and be concentrated wholly on the university and students I was dedicated to.
I have done nothing I said I would do.
And this mindset has permeated into the rest of my thoughts and actions. In all that I do I flee from any thought of leaving. I run from any idea of change and I cower at the thought of losing touch with my relationships here. I am afraid to grow up again.
But when I look back at my college career and think of the pain and growth I know the journey from high school was worth every tear and lonely moment. I cannot reject the next stage like I tried to before. It is important to step up to the line and live here and now. My roommate is living exactly how he should, he is a freshman living careless and working towards the future. I am not him anymore and I shouldn’t try to be. I need to be where I need to be in time.
I think it is in our nature to halt at the thought of a different path. I feel like our inside longing for spectacular living is so quickly squelched by the anticipation of hurtful growth. We think that because pieces of us are changed or removed that we have somehow lost part of the whole.
I pray, let us not lay down our long vision in order to continue viewing the things arranged closely around us that make us feel safe. Let us charge dangerously into the areas past plain sight with a quivering hand, yes, but also with that small ferocious feeling at the base of our spines called risk. I want to believe that the world has something new for me and I want to feel like it is something beautiful.
technorati tags: Growing Up, Maturation, Arnold Hall, Growth, Progression
My good friend Sean wrote some poignant words about Barack Obama’s speech yesterday in regard to race and politics:
When I voted for Barak Obama earlier this month I tried to approach it from a very cold and strategic perspective. It wasn’t so much a vote for Obama as it was a vote against Hillary Clinton. (Quick note - I really don’t have anything personal against Hillary. I just don’t like the prospect of this nation being governed by one of two families for a quarter century). When Obama came to San Marcos a few weeks ago I intentionally didn’t go. If you’ve seen one political pep rally you’ve pretty much seen them all.
Also, I’ll admit to deliberately forming a callous against Obama’s central theme…hope. I’ve seen what happens to people when they drink the Kool-Aid and form the image of the perfect candidate; when they buy into everything they say. It’s not pretty when the carriage turns into a Pumpkin again. Hope is too precious to be squandered on politics. Too often it’s a sound bite or slogan, and nothing more.
However, today Obama just blew my mind…something I didn’t think a politician could do anymore. He gave what could be considered the first serious address on racial problems we’ve seen in a very long time. For example…
