A question

I know what I don't want to do. The question is: what do I want to do?

A Bus Trip

All of this academia has got me thinking…

It's so hard for me to write something finished these days, to carry an idea to its natural conclusion. Everything I do seems forced and rife with tension, like I'm trying to squeeze art out of my nose.

Is true art forced? Or does it come naturally? I'm not just talking about visual art; I'm also talking about writing as an art form.

Really, though, I don't feel like I have anything to write about. There are no pressing issues that I need to address at this time, perhaps because I'm trying to stop seeing things as so pressing.

I guess I can talk about the fact that I am becoming increasingly aware of and, at the same time, ashamed of my actions and thought patterns.

I started off the day nicely. When I sat down on the bus this afternoon, I caught myself thinking the same thing I always think whenever i sit down on a rather crowded bus: I hope an old person doesn't come on and guilt-trip me into giving up my seat. This thought is always accompanied by a nightmarish mental image of a small, elderly black woman with grocery bags boarding the bus and hobbling down the aisle, finding no empty seats along the way. She finally settles right next to me in the aisle, puts her bags down and stands inches away from my comfortably resting body, unsteadily gripping the metal pole attached to the back of my seat.

In one mental scenario I give up my seat to her, even if that means bearing the unpleasant burden of standing in a crowded aisle of a lurching bus bouncing over potholes down the entire length of Hillside Avenue.

Or, I pretend to not notice her and continue reading my book, or looking out the window, or fiddling with my thumbs. I feel an agonizing sense of guilt for the rest of the trip. 

I would rather deal with the former scenario.

So, today, I sat on the bus reading an assignment for class. I noticed all of the seats surrounding me gradually becoming filled up, and I tensed up, knowing that an elderly person was bound to board at any moment.

Sure enough, it happened, sort of. A woman boarded and, finding no seats available, stood in the aisle next to me. Staring out the driver's window at the front of the bus, she gripped the greasy metal pole in front of my seat with one hand and held a black shopping bag in the other.

I looked up from my book several times, furtively, in order to deduce whether she was elderly enough to warrant giving up my seat. I eventually concluded that she was late-middle aged. Probably in her fifties.

After turning the situation over in my mind for what seemed like an eternity, I decided that I didn't need my seat more than anyone else on that bus. I was completely capable of standing until 179th Street, and we weren't too far away anyway.

I put my book in my bookbag and stood up quickly, stepping back from the seat, not saying a word, silently rescinding my sitting space to this woman. Out of my peripheral vision I saw her glance curiously between me and the seat. And then she sat down.

Mission accomplished, I thought. If not for the sake of this woman's legs, for the sake of my own sanity. I had spared myself one guilt trip for the day.

But, as luck would have it, the rest of the day provided me with ample opportunities to do and say things that I would later regret.

Turning down an opportunity to meet with people involved in an online publication I would like to collaborate with.

Stomping my foot angrily, which my professor saw, when I realized that I had left my water bottle in a lab that had been locked (something that was semi-easily remedied.)

Visibly losing my cool when I missed the E train by mere seconds, and the next one took forever to arrive.

But, I forgive myself, or at least try to.

I am not a perfect being, nor am I striving to be perfect. While I may not acted the way I would have liked to in every situation,  I shouldn't lose sight of the fact that life is a big learning process. I should only concern myself with recognizing my mistakes when they arise, making sure that my intentions are always pure, and picking myself up when I get knocked down.

The rest, I think, will figure itself out naturally.

The insignificance of your problems

Have you ever pondered the vastness of the known universe, and what this means for us?

I'm talking about the sheer size of the universe in comparison to the size of our planet and, even smaller, to the size of our lives and the problems that tend to crop up within them.

The really big problems that seem to be a really big deal for us--what does all of this mean when we put them into this larger context?

Everyone who has really pondered the vastness of the universe has probably been confronted with this overwhelming feeling of insignificance. The acknowledgement of the fact that our lives and everything that happens on this planet, though it may seem like everything to us, is a mere blip in the immense cosmic sea that is the known universe.

It helps sometimes to take all of your "so-called problems," give them your attention, and then turn your attention to the fact that the human eye is only capable of viewing less than one percent of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

We don't even know for sure our exact location in the Milky Way. We also don't know the precise age or size of the universe, and we don't even know if this is the only universe. Maybe our universe is a "bubble" among countless other "bubbles."

Home, as captured by Voyager 1

It's okay if you don't understand why exactly everything is happening. It's okay. Our insight into the true workings and mysteries of the universe is incredibly limited, even within the scope of our lowly human lives, and perhaps that's exactly how it's supposed to be. (This discussion will constitute a blog post in itself.)

This is not a call to ignore all of your problems, because by doing that you just end up with bigger, deeper problems.

But this is a call to, when you can, slow down and remember the vastness of the universe and ask yourself, does this really matter?

Befriending "enemies"

I recently had the pleasure of watching Rick Steves' documentary on Iran. He toured many different cultural and historical sites in the country, and during his travels he had the opportunity to converse with many Iranian people.

One of the most striking scenes in the documentary, for me, was when a woman he spoke with asserted that although the governments of their respective countries may consider themselves to be enemies, that doesn't mean that the American and Iranian people have to think that way.

Civilians aren't the ones creating and animosity between nations; it's usually their politicians who are doing so. Why should civilians be implicated by the dangerous games that their politicians play?

Of course, war is not meant to be fair and civilian involvement is often an essential element of its practice. To win a battle, one must do enough damage to the enemy's people, territory, and resources to warrant a surrender.

In a perfect world, civilians wouldn't be ensnared in war due to the petty concerns of their representatives. Politicians who had beef with one another would convene on a manmade remote island in the middle of the Pacific with impenetrable barriers and duke it out amongst themselves without involving civilians in the mess.

We don't live in a perfect world, unfortunately, so we end up with disasters like the Holocaust and the bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden. We also end up with hundreds of civilian deaths in Pakistan resulting from drone attacks carried out by the United States military.

Survivors of the Hiroshima bombing

Most power players have the ability to condemn others to death while living comfortably out of sight of the results. It is the civilians who suffer the horrible consequences of war when our representatives decide to punish people for events and beliefs that they are not even remotely involved in.

Those of us who understand the true value of human life, however, will not get caught up in the deluded thinking that leads to unwarranted hatred of others.

Although we may not be able to prevent our nations from waging war and incessantly fighting amongst themselves, we can resist the notion that our politicians' enemies are our enemies.