The stuff between the chapters.

You know what I think of when College comes to mind?  It is days like these.  The weather is absolutely beautiful.  There is not a cloud in the sky.  It is about 70 degrees with a light breeze.   Nothing could be better.  But it is also days like these that make me miss home.  The weather here is almost never this nice and we have been blessed to have it for two weeks.

My apartment has a spacious front yard of approximately 3 square feet.  Needless to say I miss my acre at home where I can run around and enjoy nature on occasion.

All this brings back memories of when I was in the Boy Scouts.  Spending time in the woods and on endless adventures in nature.  I have quite a few stories from over the years with the Boy Scouts (Just ask me about the first time I went to summer camp.)  I can proudly say that I was in the Scouts from the age of 3 till I was 18.  I also went all the way from Tiger Cub to Eagle Scout.  It amazes me how little I think about that one thing that took up such a large part of my life.

Oftentimes I can do this with people in my life also.  There are friends that I have not talked to in months.  They were a large part of my life at one point and yet now I cannot take the ten minuets to call and see how they are doing.  I guess that is how life changes.  One moment you’re in one place and the next you are in another.  If you told me that I would be where I am today when I first came to college, I would have thought you were crazy!  And yet another chapter is going to be ending soon.  I wonder where I will end up then?

I remember the first night I stayed in my dorm room at college.  I thought for so long during high school what it would be like to be at college and now it was here.  We often call a big stepping-stone in our lives a chapter.  Movies tend to showcase this beautiful moment of ecstasy in our lives only to then run to the credits.  The truth is that life keeps going beyond that one moment.  After that sad moment in your life it does not cut to five years later.  You live out the moment.  You feel the pain and continue to overcome it.

We as humans have come to a point where we think life has to be one big moment to the next.  Although I sometimes struggle with that, I’ve also learned the truth about life is that it is really about the small moments.  It’s about the time that I sit down and write a blog post.  It’s about the time that I go and eat dinner with a friend on a whim.  These things might be something that we don’t remember in twenty years when we look back, but they are what define us as a person.  These day-to-day decisions affect our careers, relationships, finances, and much more.  It is the combination of these moments that create the big “chapters” that we experience.  When we look back we tend to only see the name of each chapter and a few snapshots but forget the small things.

I will probably never think again about tonight and this blog post I wrote.  Of course the internet has given me the ability to look back and read what I wrote, but I will not be able to remember what events took place on this day twenty years from now.  Yet a lot of important things happened to me today.  Today is a beautiful day, but I won’t remember it any more than all the others.  In spite of that, I’m glad it was pretty outside today.  I’m going for a walk.

Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.

Ambition and Change

I watched “Memoirs of a Geisha” this evening.  Oddly enough, it is one of my favorite movies.  If you know me well then you would know that being a big scifi fan, this is in a genre that is leaps and bounds away from what I normally watch.

In case you haven’t seen it, Memoirs is about a little Japanese girl in the 1930’s and 1940’s named Chiyo who is from a poor fishing family.  At the age of 9 Chiyo is sold to a Kyoto Geisha house.  A Geisha was considered to be a living piece of art in Japan at that time.  Geisha excelled in the arts and social graces.  They were invited to parties to entertain the guests with music, art, and social commentary.  In a way it was a style of celebrity in Japanese culture.  At the Kyoto Geisha House Chiyo endures a harsh life as a slave until one lucky opportunity enables her to become the most renowned Geisha in all of Japan.  Unfortunately it is a short-lived fame because WWII comes along and well, you know how Japan turned out from that.   A couple years after the war, she comes back and finds that the whole world of the Geisha has changed.  After the war a Geisha is no longer a cultural icon but a simple whore who entertains American soldiers.  At this point she realizes that things will never be the way she remembered them.  At her saddest moment, she has the opportunity of a lifetime yet again.  The man who she has always loved and helped her to become a Geisha in the first place finally takes her hand in marriage.

There are many themes that this movie speaks to but there are a few that really stick out to me:

1.    Chiyo worked very hard in spite of her circumstances
Chiyo was put into a situation that she did not choose.  In spite of her situation, she took hold of an opportunity.  Once Chiyo was finally given the opportunity to become a Geisha, she was behind the other children.  She worked very hard to become the top Geisha in the country.  Oftentimes I feel like I have all these great ideas of things I want to do with my life, but I do so many other things that when I get home and have the opportunity to work on those things, I have no energy to do them.  Between being a college senior, working at my church, and working at the radio station, I am oftentimes too tired to even exercise.  The other things take a back seat even further and I am often left feeling like opportunities are slipping through my fingers.

2.    Chiyo did not create something new, she became the best at what already existed.
I often feel like I want to do a podcast or more work on this blog, but I question the worth because, as it is often said in the media world. I feel like I am just adding noise to the current signal instead of creating a new one.  What is the point of doing something that has already been done?  If Chiyo believed that she would have never become what she did.  She worked very hard on what she did and became the  new thing because she was unique and talented in what she did.

3.    Other people do not always have it better.
If people saw how Chiyo lived once she became a Geisha, they might have thought that she had a perfect life with everything handed to her on a silver platter.  Having watched the movie I know that this is not true.  Chiyo lived in poverty until she was nine only to be sold as a slave.  Until she was a teenager she was a servant and was often blamed for things that were not her fault (and subsequently whipped for them).
I know that I tend to look at other people and think that they must have it all together (Everyone does in reality).  But the truth is that we all have things in our lives that we are not proud off.  Even the person who appears to have it all has those private moments where they are sad, lonely, or more.  So do not focus on what you cannot do.  Instead, focus on what you can and become the best at it that you can.

4.    Things will change; you can stay in the past, or move on.
When Chiyo comes back she sees a world completely different from the one she left.  At first she has a hard time accepting this new world and in reality, we as the viewer do also.  She eventually comes to the realization that although things change, they are not always for the worse, just different.
We as the viewer experience things in the same way.  I know so many people who live their life everyday wishing that things were like the “old days”.  We often obsess over our mistakes and regrets from the past so much that we do not enjoy the present.  As Pumba in “The Lion King” says, “You’ve got to put your behind in the past.”  He had it backwards but I’m sure you get the point.  Move forward and learn from your mistakes, but do not let them take away any more of your life than they already have.

So I know that movies are Hollywood’s take on real life and from what I hear, this movie is nothing like the book.  In spite of that, I think that there are some real life lessons to be gleaned from this movie.  The viewer experiences Chiyo’s climb to success and her fall from a perfect life and feel the emotions that come along with it. There are only a few movies that inspire me to be more than who I am.  This is one of them.

The “Me” Generation

There are many times at my church when an older person will go out of their way to make sure that I am okay.  They tend to think about me and make sure that everything is going great in my life.  Many times I am humbled by the amount of care other people will take in my well being when I have not thought of them in the same way

A friend and I were talking about the upcoming election and started talking about how so many people care about what the next President will do for them. What is it about this current generation that is so obsessed with itself?  I must admit that I have caught myself every once in a while looking at what can benefit me and me alone.  We have to admit that we live our lives from one perspective.  We can never truly see what it is like to “live in someone else shoes” so to speak.  Because of that this selfish attitude is sort of understood.

But regardless of that, this generation seems to be far more focused on itself than previous generations have been.  What could cause that?  I think personally it is because our parents taught us since we were little that we were going to be the most amazing thing since sliced bread (100% whole wheat nonetheless). And except for a lucky few we find out that all of us did not end up being the astronaut we dreamed of in first grade, but in spite of that we hold onto this selfish attitude that we deserved something anyways.  We feel like we are something special when you could compare any random person to another and besides little unique things about that person, we are very similar in many ways.

I say all of that to say this: I need to wake up every day and focus on how I can help others.  Maybe by doing that I can in turn help myself.  I guess that is sort of selfish now that I think about it.