Coffee's Mate

Everyone has seen the trend toward instant gratification, therefore no one is surprised by the fact that the American's attention spans are getting smaller. I'm not pointing out anything new. I just want to talk about coffee. The ultimate instant gratifiers dream come true.
Why are we obsessed with coffee? I ask myself as I put down four hard earned dollars. The equivalent of me cleaning the floors of my school for half an hour spent on a single drink. What a strange concept that I would get on my hands and knees and get filthy just for this drink. But I'm not really making that trade. I'm just giving in at a moments whim and spending that money on this drink rather than being responsible and holding onto that money for more important things, namely gas, living expenses and the Damocles Sword that is school loans. To answer my delayed question, we love coffee because instantly fills the void, the desires of our soul...all of them. To those who feel cold and isolated it makes us feel warm and cozy. To those who feel unfit, unattractive, or uncool, it allows to hide behind this image that has been portrayed, in which it doesn't really matter what you look like or who you are...as long as you have coffee you must be cool (bonus points for mugs or local shops). To those alone it feels like a friend, allowing us to have something to hold, love and cherish, sharing our good times with and who will sit with us during our sorrows. Coffee fills the void of loneliness. It greets us with a warm kiss, fuels us as we move through our day and is always their in our times of need. It also gives us that insta-kick we need to get going through the day and we can count on it to hold us up when we're to weak to do it ourselves. We as humans love coffee because it gives us everything we want, and think we need, and all we have to do is pay a small price daily. But lets be honest, in the end coffee is no substitute for the real thing and at the end of the day we are left penniless, alone and plagued with stomach craps as we stare into the bottom of our cup and wonder why everyone leaves us...

Can We Have Heroes Again?

          In my short life experience I've found that my most "profound" (or at least the ideas I come up with that leave me the most contemplative) realizations about life come from rather ordinary places. My point in case comes from a book I was recently required to read, called "The Reformation: how a monk and a mallet changed the world." The book was discussing the fact that we see Martin Luther in a very one dimensional way and proceeded to show Martin Luther as a full person with both his flaws and his humorous perspective on various things. The book went so far as to tell a story of how Luther had told his congregation that when he often felt like he was under attack from the devil but he would scare the devil away with a fart (Nicoles, pg. 35). I enjoyed finding out that this famous person had this secret or rather under appreciated comedic side even if it was surprisingly juvenile in nature and then I proceeded with my life.

          Now it is important, in order for you to fully understand the argument I'm going to setup, to know a little bit about myself. First off I'm a new college student. My heart longed for a chance to have what I called the "College Experience" and frankly I'm extremely glad that I have had the chance I've been given. This lifestyle (while definitely not reflective of what "real life" is/will be like) is certainly an enjoyable one and it has renewed a great love for learning that I was lacking in the last couple years of my education. Coming into this time period of my life I was leaving a time in which I had successfully completed last section of adolescent development. Disillusionment. I had recently discovered through painfully clear examples that nobody is flawless, and I was forced to break down the pedestals I had put important role models in my life on. This left me in a rather ambiguous place where I no longer knew who to learn from, after all if everyone was just as messed up, confused and lost in this world as I am than why would I take advice of others if their track record is worse than mine. Needless to say this was a less than ideal way to live, no one (in my humble opinion) as young as I, can get by unscathed in life without a great deal of guidance from those wiser than them...but all my role models were gone...so where was I to look?

          Fast forward to today and you find me, a budding young college student bursting with curiosity at my very wise professor's opinion on my simple ideas and questions on our topic for the day. As I engaged my professor he gave his opinion in a very professor-esk way, making sure to use both an analogy and making me answer some seemingly unrelated questions before bringing me around to the point he was trying to make and leaving me once again impressed at the way his same size, shape, texture and presumably smelling brain was working on such a higher level than mine. But, as I walked away I thought about my about how my professor seemed slightly more human the more I talked with him. I found myself troubled with the thought that it most likely won't be long until the mysteries my professor continues to reveal to me will lose their magical properties and will become mundane, expected, and sometimes even predictable. I was a little put off by this idea. I then realized that I had elevated most of my favorite professors on pedestals like I had done back home and that at some point I would again be forced to take them off if I wanted to have a realistic view on life.

          Now before I had left I had realized that everyone disappoints and had eventually come to terms with this idea, simply accepting that I cannot put people in positions where I view them as if they can do no wrong when no matter who it is we all disappoint. I had learned that this is not something we need to get caught up on because, as a Christian, we always have Christ and can always count on him (for those of you who aren't Christian's you can just tag along till the next part where I'll give a little bit of a solution for everyone...just hold your horses) as someone who won't ever fail us. But even Christ doesn't operate as our selfish desires want him to, aka we get sick, bad things happen to us, and we don't have everything we have always wanted. However, Christ works as an ideal of someone to look up to, put on a pedestal and attempt to live your life for. This is beside the point though, what I really discuss brings us back to Martin Luther.

          Now back to Martin Luther, all this thinking about how I was eventually going to have to take my professor off his pedestal made me wish I could keep people as heroes forever without having to eventually awake from the mist. It was this thought that made me realize (sorry reformation book you are really good and interesting but I'm going to have to attack you as an example for a moment) I don't really want to see Martin Luther more deep than one dimensional. In our modern society we have become morbidly obsessed with knowing everything about everyone, no one is allowed to have secrets. Every celebrity whether minor or major must be exposed in all ways and many now exist on the ability to stay relevant and newsworthy for fear that they will be cast away for next years model. This has pervaded every aspect of our life to the point where not even poor old dead Martin Luther can rest in his grave without people peeping in to see if he died with any dirty rotten secrets. I want to live a life in which my heroes can be just that, heroes. No more secrets and mentions of every hypocritical action the individuals ever made, I just want to be allowed to see them as heroes for one reason or another and not have that ruined for me. I know they are humans and I know that they were far from perfect, none of are even to close to it but still I want to be able to find someone to look up to, a role model to encourage me and demand that I strive for better because they did. In a post-hero era even our super heroes have to be flawed, we live in an age where apparently Superman snaps peoples necks out of anger, in contrast to an era where Superman was just a perfect ideal we could live up to. I wish to live outside of this culture and cultivate a life that looks up to our heroes and drags myself forward because they did before me climbing to heights they never reached in an attempt to be like the image I have of them.

          Now don't get me wrong I have had the same thought you might be having right now while writing this article. Am I just spewing out the old mantra, "Ignorance is bliss" and demanding to be catered to, to be allowed to live in this fantasy world with heroes. As stated before I am more than well aware of the fact that humans are far from living perfect ideal lives. If there was a are you perfect test, we would flunk, of this I have no doubt. Rather, what I want is to be able to live in a world with heroes I can look up to, role models with whom I don't have to second guess every action, and historical figures that I can let live up to the grandiose mythology we've built around them. Why? So that as individuals we can look and say "Wow, now that is the type of guy I want to be like when I grow up, when I die I want to live a life equal to his." Because the alternative is living in total disillusionment to the ideas of heroes and instead finding ourselves in a world rampant with clear villains with no heroes to turn too.

Emotional Claustrophobia and Constipation: Learning to live in the Present

Sometimes I feel emotionally claustrophobic and other times just constipated. I find that when I try to think about everything at once it gets a little overwhelming. To put this in perspective, I will explain my situation. I am an eighteen year old kid in the summer before I leave for college. I am excited of course but there is so much else there; it would be a lie to simply state that I am excited for college. College will be awesome and I know I will have fun. Heck it'll my the first of many unexpected jumps into an unknown future, and for that I am impatient and I'm excited and I'm prepared, but mostly I'm just ready to jump into something new.

But, what about the life I am leaving. I'm not the best person with change. It isn't the fact that I don't like new things, far from it I find the new interesting and poignant in its place. The part I don't like about change is that fact that I can't go back. You see life isn't a video game, where you can simply replay the parts you like and go back to earlier sections if you want, its not a book you can read over and over again or a movie you can pause (use the bathroom) and restart as you please. Life is forward movement, it moves one way through time, constantly, without pause or reversal. That is what I don't like about change. The inability to go back and relive what is now lost.

Now this is not a mind blowing concept, but it is crazy how much we trick ourselves into thinking that this isn't real. We humans seem so bent on trying to recreate the past we literally shape our entire society around this idea. We honor the past with holidays and celebrations. We recreate fashion trends from thirty years ago. My all time favorite (and by favorite I simply mean the one that currently pops up strongest in my mind) is the way we try to recreate fun times we had in the past again. Couples try and redo their first date when they go to propose and thirty year old men try and return to their glory days in high school when they were the kings of the turf and could throw a football or score a goal half way across the field. Humans may be the ultimate masters of advancing technology into the future (although its hard to call us masters when we don't really have any competition) but for all our advancing we look back to the past an awful lot. We live in the past and focus on these good memories we remember.

Can our memories be trusted though? Were the times really as good as we remember them? Probably not. I remember two weekends ago I was attending a grad party I did not want to be at. While I was there I was fairly uncomfortable and was trying (harder than I had needed to in a long time) to look on the outside like I felt like I totally belonged there, while everything on the inside was screaming "Grab the cake and leave!" I also remember talking to some friends two days after that and recalling the event saying, "Oh, it wasn't that bad...it was actually kind of fun." But that wasn't true! It wasn't fun, it was awkward and the whole time I wanted to leave. So why had I convinced myself that it wasn't that bad? Because after that party I went to another party and that one was fairly fun and so I lumped my retrospective emotions together and created a memory that told me that the grad party I went to wasn't that hellish excuse for an afternoon activity after all. We do these things to ourselves constantly and I know that I have to be both intentional and proactive about making sure that I am practicing this counter intuitive act of remembering things as they really were, not as better or as worse. Some might ask why bother with this process of recreating my memories accurately and why not just live in a world where you remember things as better than they really were, because surely that world would be a happier place to exist in. And that is the reason why right there. Because I don't want to live in this happy fairy land where my past was perfect. I don't want to be ignorant of situations that caused me pain because than I will walk right back into them. Ignorance may be bliss but bliss leads to some nasty surprises (as any disney princess would tell you when reflecting back on their journey to meet prince charming).

So what does all this have to do with the fact that lately I've been feeling emotionally claustrophobic which has lead to a serious bout of emotional constipation? I realized that I wasn't living in the present. Nor was I living in the future or the past. What I was trying to do was live in all three at once. We can't do it, but I was determined. I would look back at all the wonderful times I've had up to this point and all the friends I will be leaving and everything that I enjoy that will change forever, and (regardless of whether my memories of all these events and people were accurate or not) I would feel great emotional loss for myself (and an embarrassing amount of self pity wedged in there too). As a counter act I would argue against myself by looking at the future and every new possible future that lay before me with options to live a life however I wanted it to. This lead to a serious tug-a-war going on inside me between my past and my future, which is where the present would come back in. When things went well I would feel myself pulled toward the excited future side. If something was going poorly I would feel myself pulled over to the in past "bummed about what I was going to lose side". This tug-a-war of emotions produced a two step process. The first part involved suffering from a bad case of emotional claustrophobia; overwhelmed by all the different emotions bombarding my inner psyche I would be unable to deal with them all as I felt myself get trapped and pinned down until I could hardly breathe (metaphorically of course, on the outside there were signs but it wasn't has dramatic as it sounds). This led to an extreme overhaul of the system which would repress all these emotions and produce as emotional constipation of sorts. I would be relatively unable to feel emotions at any substantial level and (much like eating with burnt taste buds) everything I experienced was just sort of dull. I wasn't really there in the moment. Swinging between two extreme sides of a pendulum, I was in an unhealthy spot.

I would not have been able to express that I was dealing with this at the time, in fact I would have most definitely told you that I was fine. I wasn't blind to the fact that I was emotionally in an unhealthy spot but I wasn't able to put words to the root problems. I focused on the surface problems at first. Some people might tell you that to fix a problem you have to go straight for the roots just like a weed or else it will grow back up. While it is extremely important to get to the root of a problem eventually, sometimes you need to clear a way to a place where you can tear out those roots, and that is what I first needed to do. As I worked through the surface issues I slowly realized the bigger issue at hand and through spending the time to analyze my experiences and memories for what they really were, see their influence in my past. See how they were effecting my present insecurities and realize how little impact these things would have on my future. I was able to get to a place where I could reflect and learn from my past and look forward to my future but be okay living in the present. It was not easy and I still find myself thinking irrationally about all sorts of events, but by focusing not on what I am doing but on why I'm doing it I am able to live a life that is emotionally confident and healthy.