Letter to My Parents

Dear Parents,
                     I remember once, when I was fairly young, coming to a sudden realization that kind of terrified me.  I realized all at once that nobody could ever really know someone else as well as they know themselves.  You can spent all of your time together and know all you can about each other, but still it seems entirely impossible to completely and utterly reveal yourself to another person.  This really scared me in the context of my family.  I realized that no matter how close I was with my parents or my siblings, I could never really know all that was going on in their minds, why they do what they do, how they think.  I think it is important to realize that this goes both ways, that as open as I can make myself be, there will always be layers of myself never seen or understood.  Though this was a scary thought for me at the time, I don't really think it is a bad thing anymore.  It is almost comforting to know nobody can say for certain why I do the things I do, and to know I don't know for certain what anybody else, particularly you (parents), do the things you do.  I have come to accept it as a crucial understanding in the relationship between a parent and a child.  So often we do things to each other that seem senseless and mean and one-sided, but we must remember that we never really know what the other was thinking.  I am comfortable enough in my relationship with my parents to say with confidence that they are generally doing what they do for me and my happiness and if I can keep that overarching idea in mind, maybe I don't need to read into the intricacies of their minds and their thoughts.  Maybe we can just be happy knowing if we knew what the other was thinking, we would be experiencing mutual love and affection and respect.

Frankl-y Speaking

Frankl-y speaking, I really enjoyed this book.  I think Frankl presented his ideas in a really humble, straight forward way that spoke from experience and study.  I tended to agree with most of what he said and I think I really like the idea of logotherapy and the way Frankl approaches finding meaning in your life.  I think the idea that there is this one grand meaning to life we could spend forever chasing and never find is terrible and terrifying.  But I took what Frankl was saying to mean that everyone must find meaning in their own lives in their own way.  This takes a lot of the pressure off because I think it is just about finding the things that make you happy, the things that drive you, and making sure those are the things you are doing with your life.  I don't even think you need to know it in the moment that you are doing it, that you need to realize as you are dancing or singing and doing whatever it is that makes you happy that this is your purpose in life.  I think it can be more of a retrospective act, something for you to look back on and realize how important it was to you, something you can identify as your meaning, your purpose, years later as you are reflecting on how happy it made you.  One of my favorite parts of the book and of Frankl's teachings was what he said about love.  I really like to think that he is right when he says loving someone not only lets you truly know them but lets you truly know yourself and all you could be, and having their love in return gives you the power to seize your potential.

Our Stranger Meaning

Albert Camus said "You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.  You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."  This is something I struggle with a lot but agree with wholeheartedly.  It is exactly what troubled me throughout Siddhartha.  It always seemed to me that enlightenment had less to do with finding something than with being content with what you have.  It seemed strange how desperately he was always searching for something beyond what he knew and had to find enlightenment.  Even though his motives were not material-based and he was not searching for something external, it seemed to be that the constant desire for more, no matter what that more consists of, is the opposite of what it means to be enlightened.  Then again, I often find myself over-thinking everything and spending way too much time considering what would make me happy instead of just living my life and making the most out of it.  I think the whole idea of searching for something is kind of counter productive because if we are dead set on searching it can be difficult to know when to stop searching because I don't think there is one meaning for life we could suddenly "find" and be happy with.  The search for the meaning of life is one that has no end because I think it is something that is completely personal and subjective.  So we can go on independent journeys on our own to find what our personal meaning of life is but I think this will just get in the way of leading happy lives and ever being in the moment.  I do tend to tie "the meaning of life" up with the after life and the idea of "beyond," and the idea of constantly thinking about the after life terrifies me because it is so unsure.  It just seems to high a risk to put everything on what may come next when we have something here and now.

Thankful for a Classmate

First of all, I would like to say I am very grateful for our entire philosophy class.  It has been one of my favorite classes I have taken in my five previous years at Whitney and I think our class has a great atmosphere that makes it ok for us to all have open and interesting discussions.  But I am particularly grateful for Gabby Afable, and while I risk boosting her ego too much by being the second person to write about her, I am lucky to have her in this class and as a friend.  Gabby has been one of my closest friends for most of my time at Whitney Young, and I think, above all, this is because we really understand each other, and also because our shared sense of humor is so strange when other people are around us they probably think we are insane.  In class, when Gabby does speak, it is well articulated thoughtful comments that I usually could not agree with more.  We always manage to have fun together, whether we are theater hopping for an entire day or intermittently talking at each other in a cafe while one of us tries desperately to get some homework done.  We can quote the most obscure Community lines to each other and she is one of the few friends I have that can spend a solid 48 hours with me at a time and maintain her sanity.  Sometimes I feel like she is the only person that consistently puts up with me, so for that thank you Gabby!

Into the Wild: Alone

   One of the most tragic aspects of this movie, to me, was what Chris wrote at the very end of his life, just before he died.  When he wrote that happiness was only real when shared, it broke my heart because it was like in his final moments he was realizing his mistakes.  It felt like he had made all of these huge, sweeping declarations and stuck to his guns so thoroughly and completely and then just as his adventure was coming to an end, he acknowledged his regret.  As sad as it was, I think he was right in his regret.  What shocked me about this movie was how long Chris was happy.  For the majority of his time away, he was having a great time.  He was struggling in the most exciting way and meeting the most amazing people.  He found what he had never found with his parents in more than one group on the road.  Almost everywhere he landed, in fact, he found a home.  When he was working on the fields, the men he worked with were his family, a true honest family he shared openly with and loved.  In Slab City, he found people who could really have been parent figures, and who even seemed to want him to take on that role within their community.  Ron openly asked him to be a part of his family before he left, begging Chris to let him adopt him and be his grandfather.  It seemed that Chris was so blinded by his quest that he didn't stop to notice when he had already found it.  He was trying so hard to release himself from the fake, cruel restraints of society he had been exposed to growing up, but what he really needed was a release from those aspects of society.  He needed people who were not centered around material goods and getting ahead in a cruel world, people who cared about making other people happy with their company and working hard for what they had and sharing generously.  He kept pushing forward even though he came across many opportunities to be truly happy, to be wildly different from what he had been but not entirely secluded.  I think in his quest to drive away the gross competitive nature of society, he found a similar nature in himself because he couldn't have been happy with what he found, he needed to keep looking until he reached some mythical perfect point of complete release and freedom.  His ideals were sound and his complaints with society were very real but I wish he would have opened his eyes along the way and realized that it wasn't all bad.

We haven't figured this out yet!

   I have probably uttered a variation on this sentence a million times in all my years, and it stresses me out!  I, like many others, like to know things that I am supposed to know, and to know them when I am supposed to know them.  I fear being left behind.  I yearn for the knowledge that I am on track, that I am where I am supposed to be and doing well.  I think in this anxious scrapping for knowledge that we feel we should have, we miss all the fun in getting there.  When we anguish in the not knowing of something, we forget all the doors open to us by not knowing, all the doors we get to open and test in the figuring out of things.
   I think a trap a lot of people fall into, including myself, is imagining that there is a set type of things we are supposed to understand at certain points in our life.  We imagine each section of our lives as a vessel that is to be filled up before we can move on to the next part.  High school, for example, is one such vessel.  It seems like a place where we are supposed to learn enough from our classes to survive on college and move on.  But when we imagine things this way we limit ourselves to the endless possibilities of our own wandering minds.  We should feel free to imagine beyond what is expected, to be hungry for more than what is needed, to be comfortable having not figured something out yet.  We must find the value in the journey to figuring something out instead of all that we place in having the answer.  It is in the journey where we find out what interests us and examine those things and take as many detours as we can to fill ourselves with more than we thought necessary.  I know this is something I have to work on.  I have to relax when I don't have all the answers because looking for them is what makes us fully developed people, people who have looked at things from all angles and have real, valuable opinions about the world because we have taken the time to look around.

How Do I Know What I Know?

   As we grow up, we learn about a million ways to learn.  We take in information in all of these different ways and have to learn, as we go, how to sort out what is useful and helpful and what is harmful to our growth.  The fact is, however, that there is no set way of knowing what we know or learning new things.  We know what we know through a huge combination of many different influences that all come together to teach us something.  Even the simplest of things is the result of multiple "ways of knowing."
   The example that comes to mind for me is baking chocolate chip cookies.  This has been something that I have done since I was tall enough to reach the counter, something that I watched being done since before I can even remember.  When I first started to learn how to make chocolate chip cookies, I was all about the recipe.  A fairly cautious child, I checked and re-checked about a billion times to make sure I was getting the exact right amount of everything and doing everything in just the right order.  But this technique did not serve to make the best cookies.  I had to let the other aspect of learning take a little more control, the role of experience.  I had seen these cookies made all my life, and so part of me knew what I was doing without trying.  That part can be easily silenced by too much attention to detail, and it is important that we don't let that happen, because it is crucial to knowing what we know.  Sometimes we just know it, and that's it.  I knew to start with the butter and sugar even though it says to do that part separately, and to use a little more flour than suggested and a little less sugar.  I knew how much salt to put in without measuring it out exactly simply by mimicking the motions I knew so well from my mother.
   I think much of what we know is the same as this.  Part of us needs to actively seek knowledge, but part of us needs to let it seep in naturally and not try to answer the question of how we know what we know because we can rest assured that we know it.