"A Bunch of Phonies"

I read The Great Gatsby this week, and that's got me thinking a lot about the ideals that we construct for ourselves. See, Jay Gatsby isn't really Gatsby at all. His name is James Gatz, and Gatsby is just his constructed persona-- the summation of all of his 17-year-old aspirations of money, influence, sophistication, and charm. The thing is, everything that he lives for-- everything that he is or represents-- is an empty shell, an arbitrary abstraction of what he is to become. He spends the entire story trying to convince himself that he has, indeed, attained that unattainable dream, reached that great summit that he had so long before imagined, but in the end, the dream falls apart; the reality of his situation is brought to light, and he is left all alone.

I've asked myself often, 'For what and/or whom do you live?' and I find myself answering differently each time. I guess you could say that at one point in my life, I had my own Jay Gatsby that I had built up for myself: he was quick-witted and dagger-tongued, cynical yet a hopeless romantic, a perfect intellectual, an overt critic, a part-time philosopher, and an aspiring novelist. He wrote lots of first pages of books and told people that he was writing a novel. He knew all about Kant and Jung and Heidegger-- that, perhaps was one of his more real faces. He read every long book that he could get his hands on and made a point of informing everyone that he not only had read them but also thoroughly enjoyed each and considered it one of his favorites. And it's easy to sound smart when you know a little bit about something to which others are entirely ignorant. It's like the kid in your 9th grade class who is fluent in five languages because he knows how to say three sentences-- that is, until someone who speaks Portuguese shows up, and then he's only fluent in four languages.

I think I first saw myself one day in high school when my friend, Abigail, asked me for help on a homework assignment. I remember that she turned to me at one point and said, "Greg, don't take this the wrong way, but you can be really condescending at times. That's why we don't usually ask for your help." At first I was kind of taken aback, and the holographic image that was ever before my eyes lost focus for a moment; all I could see was a little kid who was kind of afraid and pretty lonesome, but then the stabilizer came back online with a string of self-justifications, and the image was back again.

I've changed a lot over the past six or seven years, and while I can't say that I'm free from hypocrisy or unkindness or pride, life has had its way of peeling back some of the dragon's scales. It's never much fun at first, but then the hologram comes down, and you start to see things in color again. Sometimes, you can distinguish a faint shimmer or a quiet whirr about others-- as if they have some little hologram generator as well--, and you think to yourself about what you once were and what you've become. And you're glad for who you are, and you feel, if only for an instant, that that little kid inside you has grown up a little bit. He's learned a lot, and he yet has a lot to learn before he becomes what he is truly meant to become... but he realizes above all that it's always better to be you, with all the flaws and weaknesses and sorrows, too...

Baby Steps

A lot of times, we limit ourselves by our own self-doubt. We think, 'Oh, I shouldn't even try, because I won't be good at it,' or we excuse ourselves, saying that we've tried before and it turned out poorly. And there are a thousand writers and a thousand singers and a thousand architects who aren't writing or singing or building because at one point they said to themselves, "I can't."

The thing is, when a baby takes its first steps, they're wobbly and they're slow-- honestly, they're not very good at all. But we shout for joy and we tell the neighbors and we call mom and we write about it in a baby book because baby took his first steps.

When a child is learning to play the piano, we hear tons of wrong notes and endure hours of what can only be considered noise, and yet we urge them on: 'Keep trying. You'll get it soon! Just keep working at it.' And soon enough, baby is walking and running and little Timmy is playing Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, and we're thinking to ourselves how amazing it is that they've come so far in what seems like such a short time. And yet... in the back of our minds... is a lingering 'I can't. It won't be any good.'

The only thing keeping us from our dreams is the wall that we erect within our own minds-- the compulsion to self-criticize and self-abase and to discount any little bit of progress that we make. So maybe you're not a writer yet, and maybe you've never even been on a stage; maybe you don't know the difference between calculus and a calculator, or maybe foreign languages 'just aren't your thing.' But that's not what really matters. We get so discouraged at our perceived lack of progress when we might, with the same vigor and excitement as at the first steps of a small child, rejoice in our little triumphs, our own baby steps. They're not bad just because they're our first... or our second... or our hundredth. And in the end, if we keep at it, things'll work out. "Keep trying. You'll get it soon! Just keep working at it!" And soon enough, you're running and you're writing and you're doing differential algebra, and you're marveling at how far you've come in what seems like a such a short time. And so... in the back of your mind... is a triumphant, 'I can!'

I wonder...

I wonder sometimes where I'll be five years from now, what I'll be doing and with whom... I wonder if I'll be married or if I'll have kids, and I wonder what their names will be if I do. I wonder sometimes what tomorrow holds-- who I'll meet and who I'll find again. And I wonder sometimes how many somebodies you have to go through before you find an everlasting friend... I wonder sometimes about what goes on inside of people's heads and wonder if, in the end, we're not so different as we maybe sometimes like to think. Because I think that in end, you probably wonder, too. And that means that we're probably not so different at all...

Give them Bread

His hands were rough and worn, his face made raw and red by wintry winds. A tattered coat hung limp over melancholy shoulders, and ragged spurts of icy breath materialized before his face and lingered momentarily in the air before fading into the white of winter. I barely understood him above the hissing of the winds when through cracked lips came a stuttered, "Do you have money for bread?" I peered at him, fixing my gaze on the black beads, huddled beneath a forlorn brow; though he stood but a few feet from me, his eyes were miles away-- a glimmer at the bottom of an eternal well. "Are we not all beggars?" I smiled wistfully to myself and nodded to the man, and we walked together into the nearby corner store.

Before Ukraine, I never understood what it meant to be poor. Sure, there had been times when money was tougher to come by, and I had certainly read about abject poverty, but there was never a day where there was no food in the pantry, no money to pay the electric bill. There was never a day when I had to pawn my dishes so that I could buy bread or when I stood alone and cold in a frigid gale, begging from the apathetic and hurried handful of people crazy enough to still be out on the streets. We just happened to be passing by, but that experience and hundreds of other similar ones have got me thinking a lot about the plight of the poor.

When you get to the top...

I hate hill runs. They just aren't fun. And you don't go all that far, but in the end, you're still just as exhausted as you would have been if you had run a marathon. Well, the other day in my jogging class, we were assigned (you guessed it!) hills, and we'd be running up and down a quarter mile stretch as many times as we could in the class period. I was obviously elated at this revelation, but I got going all the same. I usually do pretty well at keeping near the front of the class when we're doing regular jogs (thank you long legs), but I was lagging behind a little bit, and I could feel the initial pangs of what would become a pretty excruciating side ache. The thing is, every time that I would pass someone going the other way, whether I was going up or they were going down, regardless of whether I was ahead of them or they ahead of me, the other runners shouted out, "Good job!" or "Keep going; you're doing great!" and however mundane it might seem, that was what kept me going for those last couple of runs up and down the incline.


We're all struggling along through the journey of life, and I think it's safe to say that we've been through a lot of the same things-- many of the same experiences, the same disappointments and joys. Maybe our courses have been a little bit different. Maybe you're a little bit farther up the path than I am, or maybe it's the other way around. But the point is, you don't have to be at the top of the mountain to throw down a rope. Sometimes, it's the little acts of kindness and the simple words of encouragement that mean the most, and wherever we may be in our journey, there's bound to be someone nearby who could use a hand up or a shout of encouragement. Life's not a race, so we might as well take the time to help others along their way. And when you get to the top, remember those who are yet struggling forward...

"Wait and Hope..."

I got on my Facebook Sunday morning and wasn't finding much of interest there-- you know, the typical rant of, 'Look at me,' and, 'My life is so hard'--, but then I stumbled upon something that really caught my attention; I guess it just kind of resounded within me. It was just three words, posted as a comment on someone's status update, but I couldn't get it out of my head all day long, and I've been thinking about those words ever since:


"Wait and hope."

I don't know if it's just the stage of life that I'm at-- the fact that I don't know where or with whom I'll be ten years from now or, for that matter, tomorrow--, but those simple words are such an inspiration and a comfort to me. I wonder for whom Dumas wrote them originally-- whether his wisdom was discovered in desperate anticipation of his difficulties' end or whether it was written for another. I think, sometimes, though, that things like that and things in the scriptures were put there just for me. It's kind of an absurd thought, I know, but it still makes me feel like those ideas are my own, a part of me.

Wait and hope. That's all we can really do sometimes. I feel like that's what life is about a lot of the time, and it's been an especial focus of my life this last while. I'm waiting to see where college will take me and what opportunities will open up as I get further along in my programs. I'm waiting to fall for someone-- to find someone with whom I wouldn't mind spending eternity. I'm waiting and hoping as I try to become a better person, as I work to overcome my weaknesses. But I'm okay waiting. And I'm okay hoping. Because in the end, everything's going to be alright, and things are going to work out as they are supposed to. God's promised us a whole lot, and sometimes we've just got to have the faith to endure, trusting that, in the end, all His words will be fulfilled in full.