Some Things Just Resonate

I listened to this song the other day, "the Brotherhood of Man" by the Innocence Mission, and it was just so beautiful to me.

Here are the lyrics:

All day, since your haircut in the morning,
you have looked like a painting, even more than usual.
We are in the wind, planting the maples.
We meet an older man who seems to know
I miss my dad.
And he smiles through the limbs.
We talk easily with him
until the rain begins.
This is the brotherhood of man.

Waiting at the airport on my suitcase,
a girl traveling from Spain became my sudden friend,
though I did not learn her name.
And when the subway dimmed
a stranger lit my way.
This is the brotherhood of man.

I never can say what I mean
but you will understand,
coming through clouds on the way.
This is the brotherhood of man.

And here's the song. 

Life isn't always nice, and people aren't always nice. In fact, tonight in one of my classes I was superbly irritated with some guys I was doing a group assignment with. I felt like they didn't care much about what I had to say--and in my mind that was because I'm a girl and therefore they must think I can't possibly know anything about computers. But that's not the point. At all. 

The point is that life and people can also be really lovely, and sometimes at just the right moment someone shines a light on this beautiful connection we all have as humans. This ability we have to understand and be understood, to love and be loved... well, that sounds overly flowery perhaps, but I just want to express that human relationships, even brief encounters, can be beautiful and kind and uplifting. 

And this song illustrates that idea beautifully...despite its use of gender non-inclusive language. We know what she means. 

Look at that Cute Little Character Arc

Do you ever just reach this point in life where you think, "What on earth am I doing? Who am I?" Well, maybe you don't, but I do. All the time.

I have recently been in one such period of slumpishness. And you know, I found the way out of it through the strangest thing: an assignment for a class.

I know. It's crazy. Since when did school assignment actually benefit our lives? Well, they do very occasionally.

Anyway, this assignment required me to look at some aspects of my life and make goals to improve in some of those areas. Goals. Goals... Seriously, the last time I set a goal was on January 1, and that goal was to regularly keep a blog (ha!). When is the last time I took a good look at my life and thought of goals to make things better?

It is an extremely enlightening activity.

While I was making these goals, it got me thinking. I thought, this would be such a great scene in a movie or TV show. There would be some girl power motivational music playing, and maybe my goal setting would turn into some sort of montage, ending with me successfully crossing something off my to do list a month later with a stylish new haircut and wardrobe.

Obviously, we don't have such montages in real life. That would be crazy, but this whole idea struck me about character arcs. Namely, we all have a character arc over the course of our lives. Stories are interesting because of the growth that the characters go through. We love the characters because they struggle. We love them for their faults. We love them for their potential. We love them and root for them. We get excited about their little successes, and we love to look back at the end of the book or movie and consider how they changed over the course of the story.

That can be the same in our lives. We can embrace our struggles and tiny progresses and say, "Wow, look at this great character arc I am making right now. My life rocks."

The Power of Introverts

I love this. I just watched this TED talk, and I think it is just so great.

Like she says, it's not about getting rid of collaboration. Collaboration is wonderful and completely necessary in our world. We need venues to share our ideas with each other and build society together through those shared ideas. However, without quiet, thoughtful moments, where are those original ideas coming from? Like she says, we are prone to simply follow the most charismatic person in the group, and that person's ideas may or may not be the best.

In addition to that, I think it is important to allow people to interact with the world and with other people in the way that is most natural to them. It is stifling to introverts if we suggest that they have to give up what is natural to them and simply learn to be more outgoing or just try more to get out of their comfort zone in order to fit in (of course, it is similarly stifling to extroverts if we were to suggest that they must forgo all social activity in order to stay in their libraries...). Putting greater value on one type of person over another does not allow for a full range of growth and generation of ideas and happiness.

And beyond the introvert vs. extrovert topic, there is simply value in working out a problem on your own before asking other people for help (and then there is value in taking your solution to the group and comparing ideas). There is value in figuring out what YOU want and what YOU like rather than just accepting what other people say. There is value is being quiet and giving other people a chance to share THEIR ideas.

There is value in the gentle, peaceful things and people who invite contemplation and inspiration. There is value in calm moments where love and happiness can be felt without words or actions. There is value in being at peace with oneself enough to be alone, and there is value in being at peace with oneself enough to be with other people and be able to give rather than just take.

Who are you?

Who are you? Well, who do you want to be?

I listened to a talk today that included a quote by George Bernard Shaw. Apparently at some point in his life, he said, “Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” I know very little  about Shaw, and I have never read any of his works, so I feel a little bit like it is inappropriate for me to quote him. I can't be sure I am taking his quote the way he meant it. Nevertheless, I really like how I interpret the quote. 

The speaker I was listening to, Rosemary M. Wixom, talked about how we all get to sculpt ourselves during the course of our lives. We get to choose who we are. I really like that thought. I feel like sometimes the people I know talk a lot about finding themselves, but that effort to find oneself can be difficult and, in my opinion, somewhat fruitless. If I say I am trying to find myself, that seems to me to be taking myself out of my own hands. It makes me into someone that no longer has control over her own choices and feelings. It turns me into someone who is confused and desperately trying to figure things out before it is too late and I have run out of time to find myself. 

I don't like that feeling. I can choose who I am. 

Let's say I am wondering to myself, "What sort of person am I? Am I a nice person?" Well, I might never figure that out. But I can say to myself. I am neither a nice nor a not nice person. I am just a person that can choose to do nice things or not. That puts who I am completely in my hands. It gives me control of who I am, and it prevents me from beating myself up about not living up to who I have thought I found out I was. If I think, "Yeah, I have discovered that I am a nice person," but then I do something that is not very nice, what does that mean? Am I not a nice person after all? It can be terribly confusing. It is better to choose who I am for myself rather than trying to figure it out based essentially on chance. I am just me, and if I want to be nice I will be nice. That is a choice. 

Whoever I am is whoever I want to be. To me, it isn't about finding anything. It is about choosing what I want. 

A Desert Oasis

I spent part of the long weekend at Canyonlands National Park in Southern Utah. It was truly such an excellent respite. It was so lovely to take some time to literally breathe fresh air. While the night was cold, the sun was so warm in the day, and it was refreshing to feel warm without being wrapped up in an electric blanket. It was invigorating to climb the red rocks and just be in the middle of nature and nothing else.

When I returned to Provo, my roommates asked about the trip, and I told them it had been lovely and refreshing. I also told them about all the things we had forgotten to take with us and how no one had really been very prepared, etc. (The trip had really been ill-planned. None of us even realized how far we were going to have to drive to get to our destination, since none of us had even really looked at a map...) They questioned how such a trip could have been lovely, but it really was an amazing experience. I explained to them that just being in the middle of something beautiful and peaceful with no obligations reminded me that happiness is not a difficult thing. Without trying, we can feel happy sitting on a rock in the sun, so we can probably feel happy without too much effort in other situations as well.

It is so easy to get overwhelmed by all the things I have to do each day. I get frustrated by the endless list of tasks I want to accomplish. It can be discouraging, and sometimes I forget to just breathe and remember why I'm doing the things I'm doing. This weekend reminded me that everything I am doing is so that I can be happy now and find greater joy in the future. And that happiness does not even have to be hard. It can come from anything, even a poorly planned camping trip where no one even remembered to bring the marshmallows.

You Might Be Interesting Someday

I started working on this post months ago. I was working at an internship in Washington, DC, and my boss was this incredibly interesting guy. He grew up in Romania during the Soviet occupation, and he told me a number of interesting stories about that. I told him that he should put all his memories and stories about that time into a book. those memories are interesting and are a valuable piece of history. 

He told me that he wasn't so sure his book would be that great if he wrote it, but he informed me that his dad had regularly kept a journal during that time. His dad's journals are filled with valuable gems like how long they waited in line to get food or what kinds of foods or other provisions they were able to obtain. He didn't write about anything that could have been seen as objectionable by the authorities, but his journals are still valuable and interesting. They show the day to day survival of people in extraordinary conditions. 

Did my boss's dad know he was living in extraordinary times? Did he have a notion that he was recording information historians would later be fascinated by? Maybe he did, but it seems that many times we don't realize how extraordinary our lives really are. Only a few people will be president or hold any significant political office, and there are really not that many celebrities. The odds are you and I won't be known by millions of people. 

I don't mean that in a dream crushing way at all, though. I just mean that while we might not be famous, we are each still important and interesting. Each of us can write a journal that historians might be fascinated by one day. What was life like in Vernal, Utah in 2013? What about Miami, Florida? What were high schools like during the twenty-first century? 

Not only do we not know if our lives will have some fascinating historical value someday, our lives can and do have that value to us everyday. We are each this historian of our own life, and every day is an amazing case to study. We can look at our past and learn and look at our present and be amazed. And who knows, you might be interesting to a whole lot of other people someday, too. 

On the Right Track

I had a sort of unpleasant but also fairly educational realization this week. I was talking to my mom on the phone, telling her about how I was doubting my life plans (a favorite past time of mine...). I told her that I was worried I would never find the right path, that I would never find a path to happiness that I would actually stick with. Everything looks so exciting when it is new and shiny, but then reality kicks in, and I start to change my mind. As I was telling her all this, I suddenly had a thought and said to her, "Mom, I am like Pippin. This is terrible!"

Now, I don't know how many people out there have seen Pippin. I know some people out there have seen it, or at least they have heard the music from it. Anyway,broadly it is a musical about this guy, Pippin, who is trying to find his path in life, but none of the paths he tries out seem to stick. 

Oh, I guess what follows is kind of a spoiler if you have never seen the show... so read at your own risk, I guess. 

I thought, if I'm like Pippin, I must be pretty hopeless. But my mom reassured me that he does find happiness in the end. "Yeah," I said, "because he finds love with that widow woman, but that is not exactly how I want to find happiness in life." However, she argued that he didn't find happiness because of the love he found. He found happiness because he learned to be content with where he was. 

This really isn't a new philosophy or anything. It is just that I had never really thought of myself as a person who was trying to find happiness in the next big thing, but at that moment, I realized that is exactly what kind of person I have been. 

Like I said, this isn't a novel idea, but we can be happy with whatever we are doing, wherever we are in life. There really is no next big thing. Goals are important, but we shouldn't live so much in our future ambitions that we don't live where we are right now. We will never really be happy if we are always looking ahead instead of looking at what is around us right now.