Tag Archives: life

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When Eternity Finds Its Way In To Today

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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.

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50 First Blog Posts Compliments of Your Support

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Last year, for a couple of weeks,  my friend and I had a contest. The goal of the contest was to compliment as many women as possible. We met up every evening and compared stories. We developed a very intense set of rules: The compliment must be genuine (self-policing); eye contact must be made; friends count but only if complimenting something not normally complimented; and most importantly, the compliment must not be conditional.

When you are making it a point to compliment people, you quickly learn that there are two types of compliments. There are conditional compliments and there are unconditional ones. Conditional compliments are much easier. They are also really tricky.

Almost everyone would agree that “You are beautiful when you wear your hair down” is a conditional compliment. But very few realize that “You look beautiful today” is conditional as well. It’s tricky.

The worst part about conditional compliments is that they are easy. They are really easy. They take off all the pressure. When you tell someone they are beautiful today, it just means that you like the way they dressed themselves that morning. You aren’t saying that you find them beautiful all the time. You aren’t saying you are attracted to them. You are saying that you like their taste in clothes or something. It’s a wimpy compliment.

It takes far more of a man or a woman to tell someone that they are always beautiful, always intelligent, always caring, always thoughtful. And it’s those compliments that change lives.

Has someone ever conditionally complimented you?

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Normal is the New Weird

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Today in my psychology class we watched the movie Stand By Me. I’m kind of a sucker for movies about relationships – father and son relationships, brother relationships, and friendships. So Stand By Me, as a movie about four preteen friends, is kind of right up my alley.

There’s this scene in Stand By Me where cool-kid and group-leader Chris is talking to artsy intelligent-kid and narrator Gordon. Gordon asks Chris if he is weird, and Chris says “definitely” in jest. But Gordon keeps pestering him, and finally Chris says, “Yeah, but so what? Everybody’s weird.”

The delivery of this scene, like every scene in Stand By Me is perfect. And so, even though it seems like a cliche, it comes across as profound.

But I was thinking, even though this idea is kind of cliche, we never really think about its implications. If everybody is weird, then weird is normal. And if weird is normal, then everybody is normal. So it kind of makes just as much sense to say that “everybody’s normal” as it does to say “everybody’s weird.” But no one ever says that everybody’s normal.

I think we make up weird. It’s a narrative that we decide to use to self-gratify or to help our world-view. If we can label other things as weird or our own behavior as weird, it creates a gap between those things and behaviors and the “normal” world.

I knew this girl once who described herself as weird. It was something she talked about a lot. But to me, she was no more weird than the rest of the world, but I found it difficult to relate to her simply because she believed she was weird. I think sometimes we assume that the world is normal and we are weird. But it’s actually that self-talk that isolates us from others. Not our perceived weirdness.

What makes you weird/normal?