Making Choices

It was an average Sunday afternoon.  I was sitting at Cracker Barrel enjoying a lunch with a few friends from church and the waitress comes up to the table.  She then asks me the question I wish she didn’t. “What would you like to eat?” she would say.  I fumble my menu in my hands and make a few grunt-like noises.  I shift my eyes from left to right until they finally settle on my friend across the table.  Guess what happens next?  “You go first” is what I say.
I sometimes have a hard time making decisions.  I have learned that I can sometimes worry more about what to eat for lunch than the big decisions in life. With that in mind I bring us back to what I said.  It is often joked about that women cannot make decisions. This often makes me wonder why I have such a hard time making decisions.  You see, I know I’m male, but I can worry to death about decisions (I also love chocolate which further complicates the issue.)
But isn’t it amazing that God created life to be a ride where I get on and it does not stop until I get off?  Our life is decided by the choices we make everyday.    Although we can sit there and worry about these decisions, in some ways it is a good thing that we cannot change our minds.
I’m sure you have seen “Back to the Future”.  Marty’s experience with time travel shows how going back to fix one thing can completely change history, for better or worse.  If we were able to change all the things about our lives that we did not like we may not like the result of that future either.
I say all of that to say this: Live your life in spite of your past choices.  Don’t look back.  You can’t change the past, but your past can destroy your future.
So don’t worry so much about what you’re going to eat.  I’m sure it won’t be that big of a deal when it’s in your stomach.

Forgetting the past

I went on vacation to Missouri a couple of weeks ago.  One day we went to my father’s Alma Mater.  There is a monument there from when Winston Churchill came and spoke at the school.  Obviously, this made the school very famous.  The speech came right after WWII in a very positive time in our nation.  Winston Churchill came to America and spoke of what had surpassed and what was to come.  He spoke of an Iron Curtain developing in the European nations.  A curtain that would divide free thought and Communism/Socialism.

Of course, at the time it was not completely understood the meaning of his words. After World War II, the spoils of war had to be divided between the Allies.  Germany was one of the countries that was wanted by both sides.  The Allies wanted to set up a democracy while the Russians wanted to add it to their ever-expanding empire.  Not to many years later, the world was facing exactly what Churchill said.   A curtain was indeed created though it was not made of iron, but of concrete.  In Berlin a wall was created that literally divided the city in two: a side of democracy, and a side of communism. That wall divided families, friends and all of German society for 30 plus years.

Imagine living in a city, only to find out that on August 16, 1961, you cannot go across a border to see your parents. They were on the communist side of the wall and the Russian controlled side had decided to close off from all outsiders.  On that day you would find out that you would probably never see your family again.  Even letters were not an option.  They were shut off from radios, mail, television, practically any form of communication that would connect them to the outside world.  Anyone attempting to defect from the Communist side would be shot on sight.  Barbed wire fences and mine fields were just a few of the things that kept them in.

The wall would finally come down in 1989.  With the fall of communism, families could finally be re-united after 28 years of separation.  This was a huge moment in the history of the world.  It perfectly captured the power of democracy.  Freedom will always win over control.
Once that wall fell in 1989, a few pieces of the wall were purchased from Berlin and brought to my father’s College.  This piece of the wall at his College still stands today as a reminder of what we once faced as a human race.

You may say, “What’s the big deal, it’s a piece of concrete”?  I would agree to a point.  When I first approached it, there was nothing spectacular about it.  It is a standard concrete pylon wall.  It is probably 10 feet tall and each section was about 4 feet wide.  It is not what makes up the wall that makes it imposing; it is the emotion it brings that goes beyond itself.

The first side I saw was a blank concrete wall.  I then walked to the other side and saw something that startled me.  It was covered with German graffiti.  Graffiti saying everything from statements opposing the communist government too shouts of freedom.  I read a sign placed next to the wall that explained why this is.  The people on the free side of the wall could walk right up to it and do whatever they wanted to. The people on the other side however, they could not get anywhere near the wall without getting shot.  Many people did try of course, and the many of them failed.

Although the communist side was blank, it carried the blood and pain of many people.  It was almost as if the blank concrete was shouting out what they could not say.  Their cries for freedom are even heard today.  This simple concrete wall, this divider of worlds, this very thing is what explains the differences between freedom and oppression.

But there is a truth to the statement: if you forget the past, you are doomed to repeat it.  We must never forget the tragedy of WWII and the almost 50 years that followed it.  We must move on as a race of beings that let people make their own decisions.

I don’t want to take my grandchildren to memorials of things I lived through.

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.