Time is Not on Our Side

There’s a strange sequence of events that flourishes with any venture between deadlined tasks. We are harried and rushed for release, then harried and rushed for return. In the midst of this tumult I find myself now, pacing and aching in any number of ways and directions at any given moment. I feel akin to a vector turned into a field, a being capable of but one magnitude and direction in an instant but suddenly forced to move outwards with no aim in sight.

It started simply enough, I told myself. There would be time. So much time.

To Speak the Public Protest

There’s a trick I’ve picked up that’s gotten me out of a few sticky situations. I’ve had a lot of leadership training, some media prep, and probably more math drills than most humans can suffice to think of let alone subject themselves to, but this trick, it’s none of the above. It’s a touch of psychology, an ounce or so of mythology, a few dashes of dreaming, and a whole lot of deceit.

But it’s not really deceit when you think about it. After all, what is the world past what we make of it? “If you build it, they will come.” If you make it, it’s yours to own. And when you own the world, there’s nothing you can’t do.

So where’s the lease, you ask? Right at your fingertips if you open your hand and reach for it.

Snakes on a Plane (or Something Like It)

I’m starting to think I won’t be having any more thankful Thursdays this semester. For some reason beyond me, all my teachers like to have all my homework due Friday morning, so naturally, Thursdays have become crunch time for me: A fatal rush to the finish, pushing past the boundaries of bedtime into the realm of “when he said he wants us to lose sleep over this, he meant it.” But that’s alright: We grow and we adapt. We change our ways to meet the new days.

I was thinking a lot about that today, about adaptability and change. After a while, I found I’m rather thankful for it, but what does that have to do with snakes? Or more importantly, what does it have to do with planes?

How I Waste My Time and Start a New Life

Man, I would love to love him.

I say this often. Rather, I find I say this often to myself. When I see a man so rapturously beautiful– a man so intensely magnificent– so perfectly flawed– so unimaginably crafted– that there’s this spark of interest, striking love, that ignites somewhere within me. It’s a powerful moment, one that stops time and draws my eyes into his.

But it’s a little less like love after that first second. It’s a longing and a yearning that’s so indescribably deep that it takes on a life all its own. It spirals scenes and storylines into an atmosphere rife with saturated imagination. It’s a want to be in love with him. It’s a want for him to be in love with me. It’s a want more than that: A desire that somewhere stops just past wanting to be like him when you start to want to be him entirely.

Or take this: Sometimes, for a split moment, I move a muscle, catch a thought, and all the world changes. Suddenly I’m elsewhere. I’m on a mountain somewhere, running through the forest with a bow in my hands. I’m clutching the delicate wood as I jump between patches of twigs and leaves, chasing my foe down the hill. He stops at a cliff, grabbing hold of a tree to not fall over in his exhaustion. I nock an arrow and release it.

Another time I take a seat at my desk and I’m not me. I’m myself, but in another life. I stare at my work, running the equations through my head and then rifling through all the commands as I shape the structure in my head. I type a few words, then a few more, symbols that make no sense to the average man–but upon which every man finds himself relying. I hit a few more keys and then–wham–suddenly all these words are something else entirely. I attach the .exe to an email and send it in. My work here is done.

But it’s only just beginning.

An End to Reflection

How fast time travels when we’re having fun, right?

So far most of the year has gone by in but two days of recollection–the ups and downs and loves lost and found and lost again, the trials and triumphs of dire courses and cross-country adventures, the happiness of new friends and the sorrow being away from friends inflicts every day. And yet, the year is not yet over.

A Pause for Reflection

I began last year by looking at the last decade. This year I’d like to continue the tradition–but with a somewhat narrower scope. Throughout this last semester’s calculus class, my friends and I would frequently ask for a moment to pause for reflection, to look back at what we’d just done to make sure we understood it properly. Just the same, I’d like to take a few moments over the next couple of days to look back over the past year and see what I did well and also where I could improve.

There’s a saying that goes “two steps forward, three steps back” and usually it implies a success followed by a greater failure that set us back further than we began. A moment ago, as I finished writing that last paragraph, I thought of saying that it’s good to begin something new by taking a look back (which reminded me of the saying aforementioned), and together these two thoughts, so parallel in structure, made me wonder: Is it really worth looking back? Isn’t looking back just the same as taking a step forward, to take two back?

I thought about it a moment longer (the thinking mind is truly a wondrous thing, and often works much faster than we give it credit for), and I decided–like my philosophy of no regret (which I think I tried explaining once but didn’t do it justice)–that even a step back can help us take a step forward. We’re never really back where we began, no matter how many times we find ourselves in the same situation; so long as we learn from where we’ve been, it can only help us get to where we’re going next.

So why not take a look back? If only to remember, it can do us no substantial harm.

Thankful Friday

Yesterday. I had class all day and homework in between. Plus the first Gay-Straight Alliance meeting of the semester and paperwork and Project Runway and math tutoring. Felt like I was stretched thin and rolled up, spread out, and stepped on by the end of the day. I was thankful for a lot of things–being able to get some homework done, doing well in class, having a great GSA meeting–but none of those things stood out as an exceptional reason to be thankful. I’m always thankful when I can get some homework done. I’m always thankful when classes go well. I’m always thankful for the success of the GSA.

But merely being thankful isn’t the point of finding a hundred things to be thankful for.

Irrefutable Elegance

1.13     This was a favorite teaching of his:

He who seeks fame, destroys his name;
Knowledge not increased is knowledge decreased;
One who does not study deserves to die;
One who exploits Torah, will perish.

Still reading Hillel. Still awed by his elegance. Reading the Hebrew, even though I’m not yet to the point where I understand the words, it even sounds like poetry. In math and science, we see elegance in a special way: Something so concise and simple it’s graceful, something so succinct it cannot be said in any better way. Hillel shares this same elegance. It is the elegance of perfection; it is the elegance that most emulates the nature of God.

I’ve been watching a program on string theory today, and in it, it was said that Einstein was one of the physicists who truly wanted to see the face of God—to find the whole picture, the equation that explains everything in the universe. I share this nature, as I’ve implied in past posts, and I dream of one day finding what I call this proclaimed Holy Grail of Science—the God equation, the one or two lines of numbers and symbols that sum up the universe with the same elegance that Hillel sums up such ethics as these. But that is a day far off, and this is today.

I’ll discuss each line in turn, then discuss the whole. It’s much the same in physics today: We must address each force in particular, then unify the forces in general. In the end, both fact and philosophy share a singular goal: elegance.