Spirit of Adventure

I watched "UP" tonight with Melanie, and though it made me cry, and left me feeling overall sad... I guess I also learned a lot. 

After telling Carl about his special time of eating ice cream and playing the count-the-car-game with his dad, Russell said, "It may sound boring but...it's the boring stuff that I remember the most." Something like that. I guess I really don't have much to say. That, to me, is a wonderful truth. It was the "small, boring stuff" that filled Ellie's and Carl's life together. Sorry; I don't mean to take it so seriously, I mean I know it's just a cartoon...but at the same time, I felt tonight that what it was actually showing was the meaning of life. Ellie was happy with her life, satisfied, not regretful or sad or upset- she didn't get to go on any big adventures...but the real adventure was living their "normal" lives day after day. They did it together.  Their lives were filled with love, and that was enough; they were happy. 

Not only is it a love story, but it's a life story. At one of the lowest points in the movie, when Carl has to throw everything out of his house so it will float again, Mel and I both appreciated the symbolism of having to let go in order to move on. He hadn't really said goodbye to Ellie, yet; he was filled with nastalgia and fear; he surrounded himself with memmories, but he stopped living his own life. 

I know I do that: surround myself with nostalgic memmories of times when everything felt okay. Or feel completely lost without my "things," my "house," the symbols of my security, that the thought of facing the future without them makes me feel hopeless and lost. 

I do feel a bit lost right now, on the whole. It's easy to feel lost when you think about the future too much. A day is going "badly," and I feel overwhelmed with all that I have to do, and I feel like I'm losing all my securities, and the storm is popping all my baloons and nothing is going according to my plan- then to think of days ahead, 1 day, 5 days, 2 weeks, a few months, a year, 10 years... it's a bad idea; it can seem a bit hopless and terribly heartbreaking if you happen to feel alone when you "project" into how your life may end up.  What a foolish thing to do. 

(This picture doesn't have to do with any idea in particular- I just think it's really cool/cute- and I want to see them and take a picture with them! With Andrew, Brian, Areli, Jessica, Rachel, and Anthony! :') ) 

Just keep chugging

This is for me, not for "you," so I'll stop apologizing for how boring it is; "checking in" at the end of the day keeps me accountable and reminds me there's a whole other world out there...

So quite basically, today was very difficult. I had a tough time dealing with people and tasks and starting homework seemed impossible with everything on my mind. I went to Maraposa park and worked out though; I ran and used their outdoor workout equipment. When I came back I felt cleansed, calmed and content. I didn't get as much done as I needed to (I'm going to go work on some now), and I am truly quite frightened by the amount of AP English and AP Government work it seems I will have this semester...on top of the senior project. When added to the prospect of dealing with the looming chaos of a play, it is honestly terrifying, overwhelming, impossible; I'm also going to be trying to do an internship and get the hours for NHS that I need... wow.

So quite basically, this is pretty difficult. I'm having a tough time dealing with all of the different imputs of chaos. I said over the break that we naturally protect yourself from things like chaos (of many kinds) by disconnecting. Well, disconnecting is the opposite of my goal: my goal is awareness, involvement in my own existence. So... so this is going to be a challenge. It's going to be pretty hard. I have so little patience with people and they're problems as of late, probably mostly because I feel like it's pointless to try to convince people to do better for themselves if they won't let themselves listen; if they won't make the choice to make better decisions to help themselves, why should I spend my time and emotion trying to do for them what they won't even accept in themselves? This makes me feel hard and cold and without much empathy or compassion. I wish I could just have some time to try to allow compassion to ebb back into me without having to go to school the next day and be faced with situations where I have to practice it. It's all a bit complicated.

Laughter is wonderful, though. I love it. It makes me want more and more. It makes it hard to go home and do homework because all I want is more laughter; I want to follow it and spend all my time enjoying it's carefree comfort.

I want to cope. I want to handle these classes, these endeavors, these tasks. I want to handle myself and take care of myself, and keep things in balance. It's a lot to try to do. Living is tough business.

Oh but the sky, the laughter, the beauty, the hope of better- around and within me and ahead of me. This is my reality right now: just keep chugging along; you can make it.

"A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials." -Chinese Proverb
(trials are not just "big," problems, but sometimes just persevering through the monotony of daily requirements in things you don't always want to do)
"What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first learn to do with diligence." -Samuel Johnson
(do your best and just keep chugging)
"True enjoyment comes from activity of the mind and exercise of the body; the two are united." -Alexander von Humboldt
(keep working out; the fresh air and use of your body feels really good and helps a lot. Doing it with someone else is usually even better)

Learn something new every day

Boring warning (ahooga, ahooga!): turn back now or forever (or for the next five minutes) hold your peace.

Today's Status:
Sitting down to simply work on homework today was a real challenge for me today. It was really good practice for the rest of the week, though! I realized I had a very difficult time; I couldn't FOCUS- I kept having urges to go get something to eat, or listen to music or ANYTHING, just to have something to do. But I didn't; I made myself just sit down and work- FOR MORE THAN FOUR HOURS (with healthy lunch and walk break in between, which included less walking and more talking with our neighbor, which was really nice!)!!! I STILL didn't finish everything because all the work that I did was just the make-up work for when I was gone, not my actual homework, but I'm still going to allow myself to feel proud of all my hard work, and how much I really got involved and interested in it; and I'm still going to let myself sleep, because I decided I need that more than completed homework tomorrow (no one tell Mr.Finn! Hopefully my six pages of notes will make up for it...).

So, before I keep rambling on and really say more than is necessary on a productive but genuinely boring day, here are some (in my opinion) really incredible quotes from the man who I spent nearly my entire day with- Sir Philip Sidney (he died in the 1500s; don't worry).
(Boring warning at this point retracted; unless you think this is boring, too...it's really all quite relative/subjective, but sometimes even I think what I wrote is boring; that's when you know it's bad! ;p )

"But all (though we do so in different ways), having this scope (aim): to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind out of the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of his own divine essence."

This one makes more sense in context, where man is created in God's image and it is, therefore, in his nature to create, even to create something better than what presently exists. Poets are freed from the limitations of what "has been, what is, and shall be" to the stretches of the imagination, of what "should be, and what may be." The goal in all of this is "well-doing, not well-knowing."

"...the inward light in each mind hath in itself is as good as a philosopher's book; since in nature (considering that by nature) we know it is well to do well, and what is well, and what is evil, although not in the words of art which philosophers bestow upon us; for out of natural conceit (natural understanding as opposed to the philosophers' special vocabulary) the philosophers drew it. But to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, hoc upus hic labor est (this is the task, this is the work to be done. Virgil, Aeneid)."

(How cool- I forgot I could use colors! :) )
"For delight we scarcely do but in things that have a conveniency (agreement, correspondance) to ourselves or to the general nature."
I guess they seem slightly less dramatic now...but when I was reading them (in the context of THIRTY PAGES AND FOUR HOURS' WORTH), they were extremely impacting to me. At one incredible point of enjoyment, before lunch, I said to myself (I was the only one home today as I did this, so all of my conversations were held with myself), "Now that is a beautiful moment: when your homework can help you in your journey to become a person..." or something like that. When I said that, it sent chills of excitement through me, because that, precisely, is the vision behind my dream of starting a school. I can't really describe it, but the stuff I was reading today was pretty relevant, pretty exciting.

Of course, I don't still hold as strong a sentiment right now, thinking of how much work I am going to have to do tomorrow, and the ridiculous amount of reading that is piling up...but at least I got to read something of such immense value. To be able to really connect with the ideas of a person from a completely different time period- from an entirely different world- to really feel like, "wow, I get it," when he talks about the place of poetry (and, as an extension, theater), was really incredible.

It makes me feel connected, like people throughout all of history were able to find a certain thread of understanding, and that those threads never dissapear, and that people years down the line, in some random homework assignment, or class, or conversation, will find that same thread and catch hold, and explore the deep colors and intricate patterns of those whose fingers touched it in centuries past; the newcomers, giddy with the excitement of discovery and awed by the honor of understanding, will add their own strands and threads of thought, interpretation, experience, and idea to the chord. (And) somehow, someday, everyone will be holding onto a single chord of threads, a perfect web of thought that connects everyone through time and space and difference in point of view; the diversity of colors will only add to the richness of the final product, not cause fights against each other to destroy or dominate certain sections of it.

That's what poet's do- create fictional ideas of a better reality.
And some poets were called prophets- because eventually... people learned, and it worked...

(Picture taken from blog.doloreslabs.com/topics/colors/; all rights given to David Sparks, Ph.D.)