Author Archives: Spencer J Smith

Super Saturday: A Hypocritical Heart Heavy with Hyperbole

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I originally posted this on November 17, 2011. These kind of violent hyperboles are literally everywhere. I can see them now in a way I couldn’t before the accident. It’s made me stop using them myself. So I guess I’m not a hypocrite anymore!

I’m about to criticize the world for something I know I do on a regular basis. So I’m hoping you can afford me the love and grace to recognize the truth in the following words even if they do make me a hypocrite.

Your exams are not going to kill you. You have a cold; you are not dying. You broke up with your boyfriend; you are not forever alone. That class did not rape you. You don’t want to kill everyone. You don’t hate everything.

Hyperbolic phrases. I get them. They are sometimes humorous. Except when they aren’t. There are people all around you who are struggling with deaths, with sexual abuse, with terminal illnesses, with depression. I don’t know. I don’t mean to be a debbie downer here. And believe me, I understand being stressed or uptight about things that are seemingly unimportant to others. But that doesn’t mean that you should compare those things to grave things like death and rape.

Life is not exactly a walk in the park (although, it is a bit like standing in the ocean), but if the biggest thing we have to worry about is a tough exam, maybe we should be blessing the world instead of cursing it.

Super Saturday: A Metaphor Concerning a Family Card Game

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This post was originally published on December 26, 2011. Uno was the first card game I played in the hospital after the accident, and I played it so many times when I got home. I made everyone who visited me play it. From the very beginning, I used my strategy.

Holidays at the Smith household are pretty amazing. We spend a lot of time playing the card game Uno.

That’s not completely accurate.

I spend a lot of time trying to convince my family that we should play Uno. I really like it. It’s a very simple game. It’s mostly about luck – what cards you draw and what cards others play. But I have a strategy.

My family doesn’t believe in the strategy, but the numbers speak for themselves. Over the past few days, I have won the most games (the numbers are even more striking when you don’t count Dad’s wins when he cheated and when we played by my brother’s “house rules”).

I don’t think that I’ve cracked Uno. That’s not very likely. Like I said, it’s mostly a game of luck. And I don’t think my strategy is ground-breaking. It’s just a plan. It does two things for me.

1. I always know how I’m going to play a hand. No matter the cards in my hand or the cards in my opponents’ hands, I know exactly what I’m going to do. I do all the thinking well before I ever pick up a card. It saves me from making mistakes during game play.

2. I never worry about what else is going on. Obviously, you can’t control the cards that your opponents get in Uno. But if you have a plan, any plan, then you are controlling all that you can. Therefore, there’s no reason to worry about what else is going on; you can just play.

That’s what a good strategy does. It gives you a plan, and it frees you from worry.

Super Saturday: When Eternity Finds Its Way Into Today

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In recovery, eternity and the present seemingly merged for me.  It seems like my accident was a lifetime ago but it was a little more than five months ago. When people visit me, I can say “it’s been a lifetime since I’ve seen you” and mean it literally. This post was originally published on November 9, 2011.

I’m deathly afraid of eternities and infinities. My brain likes it much more when I have a finite amount of things left to do.

I used to be a philosophy major. It was a hard time in my life. I think I used to like philosophy. It’s hard to remember that far back, but I think I did, once. I started to second-guess my major at the same point in my life that I began to consider it as a life-long career.

The problem with being a life-long philosopher is that your job is never really done. There are always critics to argue against. There are always new ideas to explore. There are always more books to read, more systems to overthrow, and more logic to do.

That scared the hell out of me. I don’t know if I could have been a philosopher. Maybe I don’t have what it takes. But I do know that I would have been burnt out before I had gotten through grad school. I would have been focused on the following sixty years of my career. I would have been thinking about the next thing always. That’s tiring.

For a while, dropping my philosophy major made my life easier. I don’t plan on making an academic career out of my studies in literature so the endless amount of academic work in the field doesn’t intimidate me. But now I realize that infinity, the future, eternity sneaks up on you. It finds you. And pretty soon, you realize that you are never going to be able to read everything, see everything, meet every person important in your field. Then you have a choice.

You can either let it intimidate you. You can let it ruin you. You can let it stress you out.

Or

You focus on the task at hand. You can approach your present challenge as if it is the last thing you will ever have to accomplish. And you can do it.