I feel very deeply that in moments of crisis where we’re stripped emotionally bare that we have the potential to be the most deeply effected, for good or bad.  Yet if we want to improve ourselves, we can’t seek them out since they are no longer true crisises.  And if we are scared of them, we can’t avoid them.

A lot of the mystics seem to have this ambivalent attitude toward religious experience, as if wanting it directly and completely prevents it from happening.  I think the modern approach to religion is one that desperately wants to be significant and will fail for that very reason.  My experiences around this have brought completely new meaning to “seek first the kingdom”.  Don’t let anyone convince you that the kingdom is Biblical dogma, such “kingdoms” have been overrun and overturned almost continually.  I think peripheral vision is the best illustration of the ideal approach to seeking God.  Not that he’s left out of our focus, but that we are aware of our experiences with him yet do not take our eyes from the activities and people that will actually bring us closer.

This whole thought lends itself poorly to words, but I felt like tapping it out.  Thanks for reading.

Travel Song by Pilate
Sarah Said by Death Cab for Cutie
Bulletproof Weeks by Matt Nathanson
Still Fighting It by Ben Folds
Amelia’s Missing by John McLaughlin
Skeleton Key by Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s
Wash Away by Matt Costa
A Comet Appears by The Shins
Captivated by Vicky Beeching

Today, I felt pure, unadulterated joy for a few minutes.

I find life is almost unbearable when you have nothing to look forward to.  Last summer when it was work, eat, work, read, sleep, repeat, I almost died inside.  Even if it’s a lame new programming language, I have to have something to motivate me to make it through the day and more generally through life.

A lot of times I (naively) mistake my present situation to be the pinnacle of my existence. I’m continually thinking that this moment is going to be or has been the best time of my life (and I’m repeatedly wrong).  But really, time periods are poor markers of maximums, as there is so much that goes on in between.  It might be acceptable to say that this particular event was significant and awesome, but it’s foolish to say this block of time.  Not only for reasons I will describe, but also because it suffers from our ability to selectively forget memories and to transform the past into however we feel like remembering it.  Glossing over periods of suffering and boredom can lead to an inflated sense of how things were, and a deflated sense of how things are going to be.

Also, by avoiding the “pronounce a block of time awesome” situation, you can avoid unrepeatable aspirations.  If my freshman year of college was the best time of my life, I’d best erase all records of my attendance at A&M and lose a few years of life and experience if I want to return to it.  Meanwhile, if I say the best part of my freshman year was learning something life-changing weekly or making some of my most important friends: I have a lofty yet possibly repeatable goal to aspire to.

Put another way, if we draw a graph of the awesomeness of our life, and take random integrals across various periods to determine the “average awesomeness” for our jagged graph, we have a commonly used but truly useless figure.  Our high average value could easily be chalked up to a streak of really good days, and who really is going to suggest that a random streak never happen again.

I’m making a sad attempt to live, learning the whole while what is worthwhile, and today is another day just like yesterday.  I didn’t learn this freshman year.

How much you have to work to satisfy your desires increases exponentially with how much you’ve satisfied them before.  A big house is more expensive than a new car is more expensive than a splurge at the mall is more expensive than super sizing your meal.  This isn’t a slippery sloap, it just takes more effort to “one up” your last score than it did the first.  Accepting the fact that we will ALWAYS want something more, it seems to be more efficient to start denying yourself NOW rather than later when it becomes expensive.  Not as justification for reckless frugality, but as a big huge whassup now to the lie that we feed ourselves whenever we think that “once I have this, I’ll be complete.”