I just needed to put something new in here. I’ve been doing a lot better today. Thanks to everyone for their prayers and support. I also just had two cups of butterscotch pudding! it was awesome, somehow it makes me all giddy which is really funny. I don’t really understand it but that’s alright.
Today I went to his funeral, Nolan Myers, and it was really weird, almost surreal for me. I didn’t know him that well, really at all. We had bumped into each other in the halls once or twice and I had heard his name occasionally. I went to show support for classmates and the family and more importantly some of my good friends who knew him.
To be even more honest this is a subject I have taken great strides to avoid before this week. Ever since my bouts with depression I never was quite sure what to make of death, I learned to downplay it so that it didn’t seem like such a big deal, what I had been considering at the time. Now that I’ve come a long ways since then my views of it haven’t changed. Even after sitting through Pete’s funeral last summer and all the work I did with that did it not even start to hit me. Now that it has I can’t but help myself from crying. Everything happens for a reason, and for some reason today has been full of this reality of death, woke up to a funeral, just came upstairs after watching one on some tv show.
For a large part of the time I was there it seemed like “déjà vu” or that somehow I had been there before. For a while I couldn’t put my finger on it and then all of a sudden I realized where I had seen it before. I had imagined what that day would look like, the only difference was who was in the casket, when I had thought of it I was the one people came to see. It was one of the things I would do to pass time when I was depressed, I would play out how I wish my funeral would happen. Then think about how it would probably be put together. I remember dropping hints about it, that I want it to be happy and uplifting, even if that wasn’t how I had felt inside at the time.
They also said something today that hit me really hard, that he had always lived to try to match up to his dad somehow but he never had asked his dad and his dad had never told him. That’s something that I battle with all the time. I never know what my dad thinks of what I’m doing, if he approves of me going to art school, or wanting to go to brazil next summer on mission work. Not that the decisions are up to him but I just don’t know the answer.
I enjoy and spend most of my time in philosophical thought, it allows me to leave who I am personally and look at me more objectively. It has quelled some of my emotions (although there are things I won’t think about this way, Love being one of them) to the point were something so drastic as today has to unfold for me to realize how it is I feel. I don’t even know if this is coherent or not, not that it matters anyway. My thoughts were just running a muck in my mind and I needed/wanted to get them out there.
Take care and may God bless you,
~paul
I thank all of you who kept me in your prayers last night, again I feel truly blessed. I’m sorry if I came off sounding big headed, I was just having a hard time figuring out why He could want me to leave skiing after the position that he got me in. Turns out I’m being led down the same path I’ve been on all along. This is the season of faith, the industry will accept or reject it. I would appreciate your prayers in softening the hearts of those involved and who may be hearing the word.
What’s going on right now? For the first time in my life I think I know what it feels like to be spread to thin. I honestly am not sure what to do. I have this drawing sitting on the futon right now that I need to get a lot of work done on tonight yet. It’s just that almost all of my priorities are shifting. I used to devote my life to skiing and to be honest I don’t know if I will do that this year. I will always have this passion and love for that sport and the people involved but it’s just so hard for me to leave.
I live in the land of opportunity, in a country where everyone has the opportunity to better themselves through their actions and work. That is the essence of the old American dream, the dream that has been replaced by people trying and hoping for something they don’t deserve, a free hand out. There is the overcastting shadow of expectation that has replaced the hope people once held to. No longer do people truly want to work for what they dream of, they scheme and plunder, cutting as many short cuts as they can, to reach that dream position they are hoping for all the while missing the key point. The essence of the American Dream isn’t in the destination but the path to get there and pride that you attain along the way.
In a country recently riveted by scandals from several of the most fiscally successful people and corporations, this is all to obvious. Ideas that used to be so prevalent (for example; civic virtue) have been thrown to the wayside in an attempt to help people further themselves.
The other day we had a discussion of the American Dream and what it truly meant. One after the other concepts involving complete success, financial growth, class shifting, and even the humorous sixties style T.V. family. The ambitions of those students are absurd and un-thought out. If you look back to why our country was founded and what the goals of the founders were you get a much richer and all-encompassing image of this dream.
America is the land of opportunity, opportunity for you to make something out of your life. The country was set up with that universal and basic concept in mind, it’s very obvious as you read the frame work and the bill of rights. Contrast that to what students had said about fiscal growth or class advancement and you see where the problem occurs. If you base your life around the notion of the latter and don’t achieve you will fall into problems with your self worth and depression. After all the major goal you set for your life wasn’t met, was your life a sham? The truth is that with over a hundred million people in America not everyone will do better, for everyone that does better someone does worse then where they started (in theory).
If you return to the idea of opportunity being the American dream and each person being in control of his or her own life then you avoid that problem. For the only people who choose not to accept or seek out opportunity are those who haven’t met the dream. That is based upon choice, not about anyone but you has the option to effect the outcome.
Maybe the idea of this dream has changed to the masses, as some have argued, but I find that it is a mere interpretation of what people see as opportunity.
Take care and God Bless,
~paul