Perspective

For me, driving to here...



is cathartic.

I take the mountains for granted all the time. I live ten minutes away from this height, and only come up here maybe once a year to just sit and watch. I look at the tiny, cardboard houses, and the miniscule cars inching along, I see the grandeur of the lake and the mountains rising up all around, I pick out the tiny speck that is my home in the distance, and I feel my cares and stresses ebb slowly away. They are but one more small, momentary thing amid a sea of other small and momentary things.

Then, when I come back down into the melee of the close-up, life-sized, fast-paced world, I know where I am on the grid again.


Sometimes a bird's-eye view of the world becomes a God's-eye view.

I feel Trouble breaking on the shores of my Joy

It's unfair.

It's unfair to be so happy.

It's unfair to be so much happier than some of the people I love the most.

This is what I feel today. This is the thought that keeps pulsating through my mind. Why? Why have I been given so much and others have not? Why have I been so blessed? I have done nothing, NOTHING!, to deserve it; I am still an "unprofitable servant"as the scriptures say. And yet... why have so many blessings been entrusted to me at this time?

More importantly...what am I supposed to do with it? The happiness, the blessedness? So often I feel the need to hide it, to dampen it somehow in order to shield others. I wish to avoid all appearance of gloating. My happiness is not a badge of honor I wear on my sleeve. But, still, the fact is...I have so much. How do I share it? propagate it? Radiate it?

Why? Why is it so hard? I have been through my fair share of hard. I have been raked across the coals of shattered hopes. But somehow, my hard no longer seems to mean too much to me. I remember the lessons I learned from the Hard, but the "hardness" of it all has faded, and I am light--LIGHT!--with promise!

But today I feel heavy. Not for myself. Heavy with the sense of life's unexplained injustices and hardnesses and heartaches. I feel...I feel like I want to cry someone else's tears, and know--if only for a moment--what it is like to bear their burden, if for nothing else than to be able to honestly say, "I know how you feel."

How can I feel such joy when there is trouble all about me?

Humiliation/Humility

Well, I fell off the ski lift and then spent the next hour falling down the "bunny" hill. I quickly abandoned hopes of engaging in any real skiing and made my only goal to keep my bones in tact and my tibias in their sockets. I was frightened. It was the kind of frightened that surprises you, electrocutes you, into survival mode. It still kind of makes me angry to think about it--the fear, that is.

I really don't have too many irrational fears. Spiders constitute one of them, and so does getting a flat tire. But the fear of dying at a high speed on a ski slope just really didn't feel like one of them. It kind of felt like the most dangerous and most idiotic thing I could ever do. I resorted to tipping over whenever I got up too much momentum. It made for a very slow and frankly harrowing descent. French-fry/pizza wasn't working; my legs and arms were shaking and my hip hurt pretty bad from repeated falling. I needed to gain speed to learn properly, but I needed to NOT gain speed to keep from flying off the edge of the trail into a tree. I was having visions of Sunny Bono, Natasha Richardson, and Michael Kennedy... I was far too young to die.

And there was Travis, patiently snow-plowing the entire run to keep from getting too far ahead.

Inside the lodge, I slumped into a chair and watched hundreds of people clunk by in their ski boots. Many of them were children, most of them seemed happy. Their biggest concern, whether or not the fancy-shmancy restaurant had "kid food" on the menu. The temptation to indulge in a good cry was strong. I didn't want to ruin the day for my more experienced ski companions, but I knew when to accept defeat. I'd barely started...but I also know when I'm licked, and I was licked.

...

Humility and humiliation are but two or three steps away from each other, and often the only difference between the two is what construct we choose put on the situation. It is the humiliation that brings tears of rage and frustration. Humiliation says, "How can so many people do what seems so totally beyond my potential? Humility, on the other hand, seems to bring a calm acknowledgment of our limitations--and the hope of someday overcoming them. Humility also sees the unexpected positive outgrowths of a bad situation. Like an opportunity for two people to work through a hard day and grow closer as a result.

That was good.

In which the word "yet" makes all the difference

In Brazil, as a missionary, it was nice to have a place to go when there was really just nowhere else to go. This was Liv’s house. Liv was also a ward missionary, so we frequently enlisted her help in teaching investigators. She lived in a version of the same building that everyone in that part of Santos lived in: a building on stilts, about four stories tall, clean, white brick (except her building was red) and gated.

Liv was a naturally blond Brazilian of Danish ancestry, who, I always thought, looked curiously like she belonged in my family. She had the same kind of mouth, the same round nose and roundish eyes, and the same lank figure as my own mother. The only thing that made her typically Brazilian (if there is such a thing) was her brown eyes. Liv had two sons. The older son, the 14-year-old, played guitar.

Lucas sat playing his guitar one afternoon. He slouched back in his easy chair in the unstudied way of the teenage boy, and stroked the guitar as he would his cat, which was curled up nearby. He effortlessly picked out bits and snatches of several different songs. I was mesmerized. Not many people that I had met in Brazil played any instrument at all, let alone guitar. When i asked how long he'd been playing, Liv proudly told me he'd only been at it about a year, and that he'd basically taught himself. I thought, if he can do that, I can do that.

I could do that.

For Christmas this year I finally stopped dreaming of learning guitar and actually asked for one. I knew it was a long shot. But on Christmas morning, there it was: a roughly triangular box wrapped in yellow paper. I was surprised, and thrilled! But as I held the beautiful, pale instrument in my hands and ran my fingers over the glossy, blond wood, it occurred to me that I had no idea what to do with it. No business to even touch it.



Celeste came to my rescue later that day as I sat, perplexed, with the instrument in my lap. She taught me how to contort my fingers into a G chord and then a C chord. My small fingers were weak and could barely hold the strings firmly enough. The strings dug into my soft fingers and left angry, red lines in the pads. "The calluses will come after a couple weeks," Celeste said. I didn't know if I could stand a couple weeks.

Over the next few days I tirelessly picked out G and C. G and C. G and C. I was more fascinated than irritated by the pain in my fingers. Mom gave me a book of chords. I studied the diagrams. The dots and grid that had been meaningless to me before became frets and finger positions. It was such a little thing, but I felt pretty accomplished every time I strummed out a new chord. And even more successful if I remembered it later. Eventually, I added D, Dsus9, E, Am, and Cm7 to my arsenal of learned chords.


Chords alone weren't enough after a while. I have been a pianist since I was seven. I played in a music ensemble for six years in school. I know music. I wanted to play songs. Songs! I wanted to organize my chords into a logical progression, and sing along if I could. I knew it was asking much after so little time, but I started looking up the chords I needed to play the song I wanted to learn first and started stringing them together. One phrase at a time.

(G) "You always were the..." (Em) "...one to make us..." (Am) "...stand out in a..." (G) "crowd..."
G to Am to Cm7 to D, etc. I couldn't strum worth crap. Still can't. But I practiced first with my fingers, and then a pick. I watched the way Travis (who plays very well) held his thumb tightly against his fore finger, with or without a pick. I watched how he kept his wrist moving up and down in a regular rhythm to keep the beat steady. I listened very carefully to the song I was learning, and payed attention to which strings of the chord were being played.

I started picking out another song in the meantime. A Brazilian song. It needed only five chords to play. they were kind of obscure chords, but I looked them up, and I watched videos of the artist playing them. I looked at her fingers and copied what she was doing. It was exquisite. An entirely different technique. She didn't strum the chords; she plucked them, like a harp.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_rBe7thdUY

Here's another song I want to learn someday. On the guitar, that is. I already know the words.


I haven't mentioned how bad I suck. I'm trying not to focus on that. This is me suppressing the perfectionist in me--which, believe me, needs suppressing in a big way. This is me focusing on not being proud, but humble, and admitting that there are certain things I'm no good at.

Yet.

An Observation (and a simple defense for librarianship)

People rarely say exactly what they mean. They'll often say some part or variation of it, but leave the pith of their meaning un-spoken. At work, this happens all the time. Someone will ask where the books about animals are, and leave it at that. Animal non-fiction spans the 590s of the Dewey. Kids love animal books, and publishers know this; there are a million of them.

Thus, as I librarian, I have to be logical: These people aren't going to want to go through every book about animals until they get to what they're looking for. Preposterous. So, I have to ask leading--even prying--questions. Questions like, "What grade is your child in? What project is she doing? What kind of animal(s) is she looking for? Your name, your quest, your favorite color?..." Et cetera. Questions that essentially ask, "Now, what are you really looking for?"

Even after that, if the book we've found is unsatisfactory, some of the follow up questions can be pretty vague, like, "Well, can you just find books about Utah in general?" This requires me to flex my librarian's muscle again: "But weren't you specifically looking for books on animals in Utah?" Yes... "So why don't I try a different search, like 'desert animals' or 'animals of the southwest'?" Utah books in general would have just given her a bunch of crap about Jim Bridger and the Great Salt Lake. Maybe seagulls.

If there is one thing I've learned about patrons during my eight and a half months as a pseudo-librarian, it's that many people have no idea what they're looking for. And even if they do know, they still don't know, because they have no idea how or where to find it.

I wonder if all of this, everything I've written, is analogous to human nature in general?

A Story, and it's Mine.

I just spent the last half-hour free-writing something I only half-intended to post. And now that I've re-read it, I am fully convinced I will never post it. At least not in full. It's like brain vomit. But you know what? I got it out of my head. And that's what's important.

For those still curious, I will give a brief but comprehensive update on my life. The biggest news is T. (And I'm not referring to him as T to bug him, because I know he dislikes it, but because this is a public blog, and I think SOME privacy is in order.) I've never mentioned him by name (or initial) on this blog. I'm not even sure I have referred to him in the abstract either. But it is neither my intention to be oblique or abstract tonight, so here it goes: T and I were friends. And now we are dating. In the meantime, we are STILL friends, or at least we still were an hour ago, and will probably be friends ad infinitum, as the ancient Italians would say.

So here goes. Here's my story, and I'm sticking to it:

Once upon a time there was a very judgmental girl who, never admitting this to herself, thought that all the boys of her acquaintance were either totally creepy or immature. And then one day, one of these people, who, in her mind, fell into one of these categories, swaggered into a church activity and caught her eye--all of this according to that most unpredictable of sciences, physical attraction.

But they hardly knew each other, and each, regarding each other with due uninterest (or outright suspicion) simply gave the other a wide berth.

In the meantime, the girl both liked and disliked what she saw in the boy, and battled within herself about it. But mostly, she didn't think about him. Loneliness had fostered within her a kind of defensiveness. And, wishing at all costs to not repeat certain mistakes and heartaches and vulnerabilities she had undergone in the none-too-distant past, she guarded her affection jealously, and resented the attraction she felt for the boy. What would a boy like that have to do with a girl like her? She thought, nothing, and went on her merry way.

Then one day--the day the boy discovered that he and the girl shared a birthday--they spoke again. The day was hot. The girl was coming home from work, and so was he. She saw him drive in, and disregarded it. Then the unthinkable happened. He spoke to her again--he shouted her name across the parking lot--and he spoke to her as easily as if no silence had ever passed between them.

Later that day, to compound the unthinkable, the boy asked the girl for a date. She couldn't go. But that didn't matter in the long run. Not really. The seed of a long series of (hopefully not unfortunate but definitely) unexplainable events had been planted.

Over the course of time, friendship began to grow little by little. Girl and boy began a lively, if somewhat frivolous--though occasionally serious--Gchat correspondence. The girl felt comfortable behind the semi-anonymity of the written word, and began to peel down some of her defenses, one by one. The boy intrigued her. She caught glimpses of certain sides of him she never suspected existed. And naturally, the lively, if somewhat frivolous, and occasionally serious, conversations began to occur--by degrees--face to face.

By late October, the girl's heart was well on its way to being lost. Confused, a little exhilarated, but mostly terrified, she hid these feelings. She did not dare let the boy know, because of a kind of certainty that her confusing, exhilarating, but mostly terrifying feelings were not returned, and would be met unfavorably upon revelation.

So she buried her suffering poet's heart for a month a half, and continued to let friendship grow on its own. November was a black and white month filled with some highs...and some interesting, disappointing lows. But no matter how low it got, the girl felt completely calm, which was the biggest surprise of all. Some days she felt like SCREAMING, "Why?!"...but she didn't. And she inevitably felt better.

By December, she'd had it. The girl had been in this situation before and had learned from it. Seeing that her suffering heart was on the fast track to sure disappointment, she resolved to distance herself from the boy. It wasn't his fault, but his was a door that needed closing, and soon. So she gathered herself together, bolstering her resolve with thoughts of how nice and simple life was going to be again, and with these comforting, if somewhat optimistic thoughts, she started...closing...the door.

But then, for the second or third time during the course of their acquaintance, the unthinkable happened, and this boy--this dear friend, who, unbeknownst to him, was about to be purged from her circle of daily contacts--put his foot between the door and the jam, and said, "Don't go."

So she didn't--but with enormous (and, I think, pardonable) skepticism. Skepticism which, by degrees, melted away into something like trust. And then something that was trust. And then...

Well...let's just say goodnight for tonight. There is more story to tell, but it bears waiting and watching. Obviously, from the story I've told, I have simplified and foreshortened and eliminated almost every concrete detail in the interest of being concise. And I realize that by doing so I broke my promise to be neither abstract or oblique. But oh well. Sometimes a metaphor says more. So I guess if I had to tell this story in one sentence, it would go something like this: The seed that was planted many months ago was a good one--simply because it grew.

Yoga

As many of you know, I've picked up yoga again (after five years!) in an effort to get in shape. And by "get in shape" I mean "build some semblance of muscle." Anyway, in light of said fact, this video made me laugh out loud repeatedly until my sore abdominal muscles cramped up and I couldn't breath. So take a deep breath, relaaaaax, and watch this...