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Group #1

I hate group projects. I know I am not the only one that feels this way. Perhaps you’ve also uttered these words in your middle school, high school, or college classrooms. There is value to these projects, but I just first want to acknowledge the frustration that they can come with. People don’t cooperate, people care about and value different things, and people are often poor at communicating, even when that is not their intention.

In my English class earlier this evening, I was paired with two fellow students to create our ideal English major. We created the entire program for a fake university, and it was actually a lot of fun. However, there are a few things to note about this specific group project: we did the entire thing in class (no merging schedules), we all cared about what we were doing (at least relatively so), and we brought to the table similar passions and interests. All of these things added up to a group project that wasn’t miserable.

Now, as I said, there is value to group projects that don’t have all, or any, of these factors going for them. In life, we deal with people that have conflicting schedules and who are hard to make time for, with people who will not care about all, if any, of the things that we care about, and with people who do not have the same passions and interests as us. These people and these interactions are unavoidable. So how do we live in these spaces without the ideal factors and the perfect “group #1?”

The greatest value that can come from group projects, and to be quite honest, from receiving a higher education, is learning to work better with people. Through all of the group projects you will hate, and the few you will love, you will learn to communicate more clearly, control your emotions more effectively, and produce work that is more constructive and beneficial.

I became an English major because I care deeply about literature and writing and because I am passionate about the power of words and because I want to stir up that passion in others. But I am also an English major because I know that this time that I have, which is so incredibly formative, at my institution of higher learning, is forcing me to interact with people that yes, have similar interests as me, but also with people that are completely different and oftentimes hard to get along with. I am an English major because I know that the world is so much bigger than the small one that I often keep myself trapped in. It has so many different and unique people, each placed in a specific part of the world, each caring about and learning about different things, each trying to figure out how to love the neighbor that is like them, and the one that is not. College is another world, English is another world, and my classes often feel like another world, but I remain grounded when I remember that they are all in this world, and that that will not change.

Because people will always be in your world, let yourself be stretched in the group projects, the gen eds, and the difficult spaces of your campus or corner of the planet. Know it’s worth it to better yourself, educate yourself, and expand yourself in every facet, but especially relationally, because you will deal with relationships, ones you love and ones you despise, for the rest of your days here on earth. Remember that no matter what group you are placed in, you are always in the group of “people,” and that everyone else in this world is right there in that group with you.

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Innocence: Is it Entirely Lost Among Us as We Grow Up?

     This question hits hard. To even begin to explore this question we have to first define innocence. Is it not knowing what the F-word is? Is it being a virgin? Is it having never told a lie? Is it sharing your crackers because that was the only thought that ever crossed your mind; because selfishness and entitlement were, perhaps, once not the first behavior you chose? Perhaps innocence, for the purpose of this discussion, is not simply being uncorrupted and unexperienced in culture and society, but possessing a mind that is pure, or perhaps, at least, striving to be pure.

     With that in mind, we have to ask ourselves if we are left with any of this “innocence” after the first smoke, the first interaction with death, the first big mistake. Is that just it? Do we slowly experience all that there is to experience in life, and are then left with no hope, no essence of light, and no remnant of the ability to be genuinely, youthfully, and unapologetically kind--or pure in heart and pure in mind? Does the corruption enter into our minds and seep into our souls and leave us with an irrevocable transaction?

     It is hard to say, and yet, everyone seems to be asking this question that possesses no clear answer. We all want to believe that we won’t ruin our lives if we decide to have another drink, or if we lie about our grades to one more relative, or if we run one more red light, and yet, those things do affect us. But how? Do they leave us with no second chances and no room for grace?

     Perhaps that is the real question: do we believe that grace is still available to us even after we’ve “lost our innocence,” messed up one too many times, or made a decision that we cannot reverse? Some of us have parents that offer eternally open arms, and some of us have never been given a true, unconditional second chance. We have felt the weight of one mistake that is too heavy to turn from, and we live under that weight, breathing heavily as a result, and wishing we had never made that decision, and never lost that freedom, that purity, that innocence.

     For decades, authors have explored what it means to be innocent, and how this issue, which is deeply human, is one that can be pulled from countless written stories. For just one example, the author Flannery O’Connor often plays around with themes of grace, redemption, and ultimately, innocence, and what it can mean to lose it, and to regain it. In her story, “Greenleaf,” the main character is offered a moment of grace at the end. Without spoiling the story (go read it!), she lives a life that would not really be considered innocent. We see her dirty thoughts, we feel her bitter distaste for people, and by our definition, she lacks the sort of striving to be pure in mind and heart that is a part of being “innocent.” She does not choose to exhibit kindness and grace, and yet, the story ends with her receiving what she did not deserve: a sort of escape, freedom, innocence. This leaves readers with many questions, but one of which is: is innocence given (and thus can be taken), or is it chosen (and thus equally attainable for all individuals throughout all of their lives)?

     Of course, we must understand that the innocence that we label a five-year-old as having will never be the same as the innocence we label a twenty-five-year-old as having. We live and we experience, and we feel, and the corruption cannot be escaped--that is a reality of this world. No amount of hiding can keep it from catching you, and pulling you, and causing you to do things that you will regret.

     But perhaps that is not even the point. Perhaps, because it is inescapable, the point is that we have to choose how we live within the constraints that our lives present. The inevitable reality is that we will lose “innocences” in our life. It is absolutely unavoidable. We will lie, and cheat, and beg for forgiveness that we don’t deserve over and over again. But we will also love, and be loved, and forgive, and somewhere in between the tension of those two realities of giving and receiving grace, I think that there is an innocence that never really left us, but was only forgotten as we lived, and experienced, and felt all that the world offers.

     Even in the unanswerable and the questions that we are left with here, we must remember that we have to decide to hold on to the part of ourselves that gets lost, but we also have to remember that it never really leaves us. We must decide that it is more important to let our hearts and minds be permeated with purity so that, for all of the corruption and pain that we face, we can still hold on to a kindness, a forgiveness, and an innocence that will never be truly lost. I have seen this theme of innocence often throughout my spring semester. 

     Perhaps I have only been made more aware of it due to the discussion in class that spurred this interest. Or perhaps it has always been a topic widely spoken about, but that I didn’t notice formerly. Either way there are some instances in literature that I have specifically come across recently.

     First, in a spontaneous challenge to read a book I’ve never read before, I picked up The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I was not overly interested in the book, but I came across something that certainly sparked my interest. The protagonist is first interacting with the two children she is the new governess for and her descriptions of them pertain quite well with this discussion of innocence. She describes seeing a “positive fragrance of purity…something divine…his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love…[and] charm” and all of this equated to a sort of “sweetness of innocence” (James 13). According to this woman’s perspective, innocence is rooted in love and founded upon purity, charm, and sweetness. This is an interesting perspective, and it is hard to identify those things in someone. I wonder what it was about these children, and the boy specifically, that made the woman note these things about him. How could she see this “indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love”? (James 13). What does that look like? How do we identify it in ourselves and in others? And is it something that an older boy, or even a man, can possess? It is certainly thought provoking, and results in no clear answers.

     Another book I read left me pondering innocence even more, and that is The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin. This is a middle-grade novel that follows the journey of the protagonist, Suzy, through the grief of losing her best friend in a freak accident of drowning. At the end of the novel, after she has struggled, grown, and learned from everything that she has gone through, she ponders innocence gained and innocence lost. She leaves readers of her story with this question, “what if we could return to the feeling we had when we were little, that sense that anything is possible?” (Benjamin 311). She, as one who might still be considered innocent (given her age), is actively describing innocence as a sort of feeling of possibility and believing in anything. By her expression here, perhaps innocence is not being too warped by reality to still be able to believe and to hope.

     With that, I cannot leave this discussion of innocence without including my own personal beliefs. As a follower of Christ, hope is at the core of my existence. With a religion built upon faith and trust, I often only have hope to rest in. It is in this hope, that like Suzy, I have found a sort of innocence. I have never been to far from this hope to not be able to believe in something; to believe that my life is not void of all joy and purpose. It is in that that I have found a sort of innocence that is set apart from the world, and from those who could have perhaps lost their innocence, or merely their hope. In a world void of innocence, the moment humanity fell in the garden many years ago, something had to happen to restore innocence; something was needed: a Redeemer; a Savior. One who wasn’t guilty, One who was absolutely and completely innocent. Perhaps, in this world that is in the process of being entirely restored—a world in the midst of a sort of already-not-yet completion and restoration—these glimpses of purity and innocence that we see are merely that: glimpses. 

     Little hopes and little promises of a world that will one day be fully innocent again, and where the inhabitants of this world will be as well. Perhaps the governess, Suzy, and I all have something in common relating to being innocent: we are not, and yet, we can have a hope in Jesus that one day we will be. That is the innocence we grow into as we age. Maybe not in this life will we find it, but we can find it, and there is hope in this promise of restoration, and of the promise of a garden that will one day be innocent again as well.

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“I enjoy reading.”

Have you ever said that you really enjoy doing something? That thing for me, growing up, was reading, but if I’m going to be honest for a second, that relationship between literature and myself did not always look like enjoyment--sometimes it really didn’t at all.

I grew up encouraging myself to read for fun, not because anyone made me or told me to. And I grew up quickly realizing that in the world of books you can quite literally escape to other worlds and I suppose that is why I read. But sometimes I was perfectly content in my world. I was perfectly content to fill my time with movies, board games, and outdoor explorations with my brothers. Sometimes I did not need or want to escape the life I lived, and it was in those moments that I did not want to read. I did not see the need or the point, and sometimes, I couldn’t even understand why or how people could dedicate so much time to words on pages when there is so much life to live off of the pages.

And yet, I am an English major, so something must have happened to get from there to where I am now. But I don’t think it was any one thing or moment that transformed me into always enjoying reading. I think what happened was I developed a deeper understanding of the value of reading in the moments when I did, and I could view it as more than something to be done for merely pleasure, but also for the layers and complexity of reading that go far beyond simply escaping to other worlds.

I grew up reading the sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian novels that literally transported me to other worlds and so, that was what I equated reading to, and so when I didn’t feel the need to “travel,” I was content to simply not read. I sometimes feel like a fraud saying I have always enjoyed reading because I just don’t think that’s true if I’m being entirely honest. There have been months where I don’t read, months where I don’t pick up a single work of literature, months where I neither engage with nor even think of other peoples’ workings of words. And yet, one day I want to teach English--literature--to students that are growing up just like I was...so why is that?

Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor at Liberty University, talks about reading virtuously. She says, in an article published in Christianity Today, that  “to read virtuously is to rebel against this chaos.” This chaos being a world where so many things are competing for our attention, like it was when I was growing up, like it is now. This type of reading, consistently and actively, helps young readers to be exposed to “the sort of truth that emerges organically from the give-and-take of weighing and reckoning competing ideas against one another,” she says in her novel, Booked. Thus, encouraging people, children, everyone, to read, she is saying that it is not negative, ineffective, or a waste of time, but that it can be an enriching, life-giving, and adventurous journey of learning and growing and being stretched in other worlds to ultimately be stretched in our own world.

I want to teach English to help students to figure out who they are and to help them figure out the world they are living in through the incredible gift and tool that literature is, and so, even for all of the days I don’t enjoy reading, and I know they won’t either, I will still value it, encourage it, and, as much as possible, cultivate a world that does the same.

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Grocery Store

As she entered the grocery store, she possessed an insane amount of courage, because she knew that she was going to do something she had never done before, something that would leave her mark on this store, this town, possibly even this world, and although she was fearful of doing something like this, the courage overpowered it and as she walked the aisles, passing the cereal, the chips, the cookies, counting the steps to the back of the store, near the produce, near the meats, near the breads, she stopped suddenly, reaching her fingers out to grasp the flower she would steal for her grandmothers grave, though five year old Liz knew it was wrong, she also remembered her mom saying that daisies were nana’s favorite and in that moment she couldn’t imagine going to the funeral without this gift, even if it wasn’t hers to take, in a way it felt like nana’s before she even exited from the automatic doors.

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Falling and Flying

It began with a flight that led to a car that took me to heights I had never seen before, heights that birds leapt from knowing they would still have life, heights that possessed thinner air that I could still breathe in, but heights that couldn’t promise my life if I were to try to fly, and it was this fact that made the tips of those heights, once I had reached their limits, through hundreds of steps and hundreds of seconds of putting one foot in front of the other, absolutely terrifying, and even though that air was breathable, I was still left to catch my breath and wonder about these heights and about my inability to catch myself if I were to fall and fall and fall, and not take flight.

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Putting Things Back Together...

“This memoir--if that is the right name for it--is a roundabout, futile way of making amends” (So Long, See You Tomorrow). 

What is art? What is wholeness? And what could be the connection between the two?

William Maxwell, author and artist himself, in an interview with Charlie Rose, says this writing, that fiction, is a way of attempting to put things back together. He talks about how he, himself, attempts to make things up through art, and that the need for this stems from the deprivation that life inevitably causes to all of its inhabitants.

It is an intriguing thought: that art could play a part in constructing, in some way, a deconstructed and deconstructing world.

Maxwell’s outlet for expressing art is through writing, specifically fiction, as his book So Long, See You Tomorrow is a work of. However, like the quotation above states, it is also a sort of memoir, written in “fiction” to allow him the ability to fill in the gaps and to grant, at least, an attempt to make amends.

This work of fiction--this work of art--gives Maxwell the freedom to enter into minds he never truly knew and to create a story that, although not entirely factual, is powerful, and is a clear effort to give peace to, at the very least, himself and his unique experience in life, as he is also trying to make some sort of restoration to his world, and ultimately, to all of the world.

Maxwell makes a disclaimer halfway through his novel, “If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any” (56).

Maxwell talks about how there are so many things in our adolescence, in our lives, that we cannot accurately remember--this is important, remember this. This is where art enters in, and the forming of something out of the near nothing (being our inaccessible memories) becomes restitution--becomes hope.

There is an encouragement to all individuals, and writers specifically, that can be found here: we are not lost to the gaps. Our filling of them may bring peace; may bring closure. These attempts, these uses of the outlet of art, should not be our only attempt to put things back together, but it can at least be one form of therapy and of healing.

Go, create, heal, and know that you are not the sum of what you can, and cannot, remember.

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First Draft

I was sitting at lunch when my phone alerted me of this message: “Hi! So I know this is super late notice but...” You wanted my help with your first draft and I just happened to be considering a nap at that exact moment. Fortunate for the both of us two other things were also true about me at the exact moment when I read that message, sitting at the lunch table: I hate naps and I had also just written my first draft the night before, so we could help each other.

I have this tendency to get assignments done way before I actually need to, which is helpful most of the time, except for when I stress myself out for not getting something done ahead of time. All of this to say, I’m really glad we were able to help each other out.

The thing about first drafts is that they are not very good--surprising, I know. I wrote mine in a few hours and didn’t re-read anything as I was writing. I suppose that was out of fear: fear of not liking what I had written, fear of needing to start over, fear of everything feeling wrong, over and over again, in every sentence. But you read it, and you gave me helpful comments and kind encouragement and you’ve helped me to think that in a couple more drafts, it will be ready to submit, maybe...probably...

To all of the students beginning their rough drafts as we enter into this season of finals, I offer some advice:

1) Be sure to prepare in advance and to prepare well. Make a proposal, create an outline, make a bibliography, waste an obnoxious amount of notecards copying down possible quotations to use, and prepare more than is necessary rather than the opposite.

2) Go some place quiet, some place alone, set out all of your obnoxious sources, notecards, and that outline you aren’t quite sure of, and open up a fresh document.

3) Write. Write without re-reading. Write until your head hurts and your fingers forget where the letters reside. Write until night comes and you cannot physically write any longer. Write until you’re no longer fearful of what you have written but are confident that something you have typed onto your screen will be worthy of submitting to your professor, even if it is many drafts and revisions later.

We all have a bit of a different writing process, and that doesn’t mean that any of them are wrong. This advice is merely that: advice. You don’t have to take it, and it is not the Bible of writing research papers by any means. It is merely an encouragement and a push for you to go get started on that paper, because you’ve got this. I’m off to go clean up my intro paragraph and address some grammatical errors. Also, be sure to check your closing paragraph, that’s important as well...

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Proposal.

My first mistake was taking the stairs; only three flights but I was still winded when I reached my Professor’s office. I had sat there a number of times before, but I was not confident in why I was coming this time. A dreaded time of year: a time for the use of the library and academic sounding words, a time for research papers.

I gripped the papers in my hand, as if they were a precious gem. This was my proposal, and these papers were my ring.

I reached the door, knocking swiftly, entering in slowly, and lowering myself to the chair. I rest my backpack against the chair and waited for my professor to stop clacking the keys of his computer.

“I have my proposal,” I shakily declared. “Let’s go over it.”

I scratched notes into my notebook as quickly as I could, preparing for the heavy workload ahead of me. Writing isn’t easy. It’s not a small task. And it isn’t even something that necessarily comes easily to me, though I am an English major, though that is the assumption.

Although I love it fiercely, perhaps that fierce love often turns to the fear of being good enough.

My words are a part of me, and when I begin to create them for others to see, I am becoming actively vulnerable and that is scary.

It is scary to hand my words over on a paper. It is scary to see them move from the paper to another’s mind as their eyes glide over each word. And it is scary to know that I will make mistakes, and that those mistakes, printed on pages, are visible to any eyes that are willing to look.

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Time.

You know how you wake up when you are twelve years old and it seems like life will never move forward? How everything seems dull and lifeless and nothing seems to be happening?

You know how when you’re an adult and you have all of these dreams and aspirations and opportunities, and yet you are still waiting for the next big thing to happen? Waiting to make it in life?

Time is such a weird thing. One day you’re wishing it away out of the sheer boredom and misery of being twelve, and the next you’re wishing it away out of frustration for the constructs and expectations you’ve built around your idea of what it means to be an adult.

And somewhere in the midst of all of this time, those days you wished away in boredom and frustration actually begin to dissipate, like the vapor that you stared down when mom made your twelve-year-old self mac & cheese, or like the fog that keeps your eyes fixated on the road as you commute to work, and suddenly months begin to feel like weeks and you reach a point of no return.

You cannot go back to the boredom or the frustrations; you can never be twelve again and you can never even be the adult that you were yesterday: they are gone, like the vapor, like the fog, and they will not be returning.

Time is like that. Those months that begin to feel like weeks keep passing by and they are not coming back around to give you a second chance at contentment and satisfaction. One day “bored” won’t be an option on your menu of life, and neither will “frustration.”

They say time goes by faster as you get older, but really, you just begin to notice how quickly it has always gone by, and how often you fail to hold on to a moment before it is gone.

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Suspense.

Although, when you were a child, you found the excitement in everything, and no season was too bitter for you to not wander outside into the unknown and nothing could prevent you from wandering, sometimes you still got a little stuck. Even though you were sometimes confined to the walls of your room, you still tried to push through the plaster to let yourself wander. Because, all you knew was how to leaf your way through life, as if your life were pages in a story book. For some reason you made conversations with your action figures and stuffed animals and dolls and for some reason, in spite of everything, you lived in and out of the dreams that woke you crying and in the mornings when you were too excited for the day to sleep past 5am. And just between you and me, it is in all of this awkward and unknown that I think you grew up, and began to live.

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Distractions.

I sulked up to the door, pulling the metal door handle down and entered into the building that was set away from campus, transformed from the home that it used to be. I walked through two doorways and began to run my fingers along the chairs, deciding which would be mine for the evening. I settled on the same one as the last week, a creature of habit as they say. Settling down heavily, I set my burdensome backpack against the table leg and reached into it for a notebook and pen, my companions for the next couple of hours. This particular class is longer than I prefer, but my real problem that night, was deciding to sit in the seat that I sat in--for the second week in a row.

This seat, stationed comfortably against the west wall, facing, inevitably, an east window, was opened to a street and a neighborhood that had just enough cars and trees to keep me entirely distracted for as long as my body was relaxed within the comfort of that chair.

You see the problem with my being asked to pay attention to one thing for an extended amount of time, is that every other thing suddenly becomes so much more interesting to me the second that that requirement is placed upon me.

Every car that speeds by is suddenly a vessel begging and holding so many questions: where are you rushing too? Why are you driving exceptionally slow? How much did your car cost? Is there a reason your music is causing the very seat I’m in to shake? Where you are going...and can I come too?

My brain throws a hundred questions together in the few seconds it takes for a vehicle to enter and leave the vicinity of that wide, open window.

Every squirrel that runs up a tree and to the end of a branch leaves me on edge: wondering and anticipating what it will do next, which is funny because I don’t particularly like squirrels and could generally not care less about them.

But, when my attention is being required, a message is sent to my mind and all of the sudden I am lost in my thoughts and to pull myself back to focus requires all of my cognitive energy.

College is hard, and a mind that is racing to find all that it can to distract itself makes it that much harder.

Fortunately the world outside of the window is interesting, and the people that walk in and out of their cars, the squirrels that live life on the edges of near twigs, and the boys that carry logs across the yard are just captivating enough for the distractions to be worth it.

I will always benefit from the learning that occurs within the walls of the buildings on my campus, but sometimes I have to let my eyes wander through the windows, to cultivate distractions, and to remember that there is a world outside of the window and that that is the world that I live in first, even before the world that I live in within the classroom.

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Reality.

“Have you ever thought about a career in law enforcement?” No sir, I can’t say that I have.

From the time we are young we are asked what we want to be when we grow up. We are expected to have an answer, an idea, if nothing else, a dream. And then, when you get to college, you not only should have your future figured out, you almost need to.

Career fairs, though they are incredibly helpful, are oftentimes more daunting and terrifying than constructive. For a meager freshman, thoughts about professional headshots and resumes are not at the forefront of my mind. I don’t want to have to imagine forty hour work weeks and retirement funds. I don’t want to picture a mortgage and a boss. I don’t want to wake up and step out of the bubble of college. But reality comes, swiftly, without knocking or asking permission, as if it holds its power over you, crippling you from the excitement of a career, and instead leaving you terrified.

But alas, reality cannot be suppressed or ignored, so let me tell you what this career fair is like.

Check-in. Looming doors. Fluorescent lights. Upbeat music. And tables: lots and lots of tables, lined in rows, covered with candy and pens and an overwhelming amount of information for you to fill your empty, plastic “2019 career fair” bag with. The environment is welcoming and the promise is somewhere between all of those wide, smiling faces. A promise that you can get a job and that you will get a job, if not today, then one day. We hold this promise dear to us in the United States. It is a comfort. Perhaps the nerves that enter when we step into a career fair do not stem from if we will get a job, but of how: how it will be, how it will pay, and how it will affect us for as long as we are there.

As I paced the rows, glancing at all of the company names, offering hellos and how are yous to all who locked their eyes with mine, which was many I might add. My hands were empty--no resume, no expectation, not even a dream. Perhaps I paced out of obligation, or curiosity, or wonder at how we live in a world with so much to offer, with so much expectancy and opportunity. Perhaps as I walked, locking onto every eager face, all looking for someone who might help them to better their business, I found a sort of amusement. In a world of so many unemployed and desperate humans, we walked those rows overwhelmed by our options, and maybe a part of me was disappointed that I could walk so carelessly, so freely, into my reality, never bothering to remember all of the realities that do not walk under the fluorescent lights so freely, and whose reality possesses a different sort of light--one that is often hard to see amidst so few opportunities.

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The Tension of Believing

What is the cost of believing in something? Or is there no cost? What about a cost to believing in nothing? Do the implications of not believing weigh more heavily on one’s soul than to believe in something?

Flannery O’Connor writes a story titled “Good Country People” that began to conjure up these thoughts in my mind, and being that the human mind is so complex, I am left to wonder, and to continue wondering, and to wonder if my wondering will ever lead me to any assumptions...

With that, let me invite you into my wondering and into this conversation, wherever you may sit, stand, or wander in.

O’Connor tells the story of a thirty-two year old lady who, possessing a Ph.D in philosophy, and having an artificial leg, spends her days residing in the home of her mother, almost exclusively. One day, a man meanders up to the front door of this family and begins to sell Bibles (don’t at first assume that he is a Christian, we are always too fast to make assumptions based on the brief information we let in when we have initial meetings with individuals...just wait).

The man comes and goes, but notices the daughter, and the next day, they meet up. This woman is so confident and so sure that she could never taste disorder in her life that she enters into this new situation curious (and perhaps even a little hopeful), but also believing that nothing grand will or could happen, and that he will be just a good ole’ country boy.

As she begins interacting with this man, though, she begins to experience things she never has before--thoughts, emotions, touches--and her curiosity turns into full-fledged hope that this man could become more than just a salesman in her life. She begins to long for him, or at least for all of these wishes she’s building around him, and she trusts him to take her leg off, and it is from there that we begin to see the complexities of this “simple, country boy” laid out.

She asks him to give her her leg back, he bluntly refuses, and in this moment her curiosity, her confidence, her hopefulness, and whatever sort of trust she briefly exhaled into that space for him were all whisked away when reality hit her.

She screams for his Christianity to be real, but he hisses back that he never believed in that crap, leaving her silent and frozen.

He told her, and this is what I locked into, that he had been believing in nothing ever since he was born.

And this woman’s mother, upon seeing this man leaving in the distance, wonders at his simplicity, and how we would all be better off to be that simple.

This entire story is fused with insincerity and the perceptions we have that, when reality inevitably comes, are crushed beneath people’s true personalities. One can only maintain a fake persona for so long.

But even here, although the woman saw who he truly was, the mother did not, and readers--human beings--are left begging the question of what is real? And if being real for this man meant to believe in nothing, is that a life worth leading? 

And even the woman, who believed so strongly that she could not be surprised, ended up lost and confused and questioning everything.

How do we live in the tension of knowing that we need to believe in things to function and to lead a worthy life, but also of being fearful that the things that we believe could, in a moment, be shattered into oblivion?

It is here, in this tension, that, although we may not find a plethora of answers, we may find something else: knowledge, through the very same curiosity of this woman, and the simplicity of the man there is a balance that is, perhaps, worth pursuing?

Photo Credit

[haleegaff-blog]

Is all innocence lost among us as we grow up...?

This question hits hard. To even begin to explore this question we have to first define innocence. Is it not knowing what the F-word is? Is it being a virgin? Is it having never told a lie? Is it sharing your crackers because that was the only thought that ever crossed your mind; because selfishness and entitlement were, perhaps, once not the first behavior you chose? Perhaps innocence, for the purpose of this discussion, is not simply being uncorrupted and unexperienced in culture and society, but possessing a mind that is pure, or perhaps, at least, striving to be pure.

With that in mind, we have to ask ourselves if we are left with any of this “innocence” after the first smoke, the first interaction with death, the first big mistake. Is that just it? Do we slowly experience all that there is to experience in life, and are then left with no hope, no essence of light, and no remnant of the ability to be genuinely, youthfully, and unapologetically kind--or pure in heart and pure in mind? Does the corruption enter into our minds and seep into our souls and leave us with an irrevocable transaction?

It is hard to say, and yet, everyone seems to be asking this question that possesses no clear answer. We all want to believe that we won’t ruin our lives if we decide to have another drink, or if we lie about our grades to one more relative, or if we run one more red light, and yet, those things do affect us. But how? Do they leave us with no second chances and no room for grace?

Perhaps that is the real question: do we believe that grace is still available to us even after we’ve “lost our innocence,” messed up one too many times, or made a decision that we cannot reverse? Some of us have parents that offer eternally open arms, and some of us have never been given a true, unconditional second chance. We have felt the weight of one mistake that is too heavy to turn from, and we live under that weight, breathing heavily as a result, and wishing we had never made that decision, and never lost that freedom, that purity, that innocence.

For decades, authors have explored what it means to be innocent, and how this issue, which is deeply human, is one that can be pulled from countless written stories. For just one example, the author Flannery O’Connor often plays around with themes of grace, redemption, and ultimately, innocence, and what it can mean to lose it, and to regain it. In her story, “Greenleaf,” the main character is offered a moment of grace at the end. Without spoiling the story (go read it!), she lives a life that would not really be considered innocent. We see her dirty thoughts, we feel her bitter distaste for people, and by our definition, she lacks the sort of striving to be pure in mind and heart that is a part of being “innocent.” She does not choose to exhibit kindness and grace, and yet, the story ends with her receiving what she did not deserve: a sort of escape, freedom, innocence. This leaves readers with many questions, but one of which is: is innocence given (and thus can be taken), or is it chosen (and thus equally attainable for all individuals throughout all of their lives)?

Of course, we must understand that the innocence that we label a five-year-old as possessing will never be the same as the innocence of a twenty-five-year-old. We live and we experience and we feel, and the corruption cannot be escaped--that is a reality of this world. No amount of hiding can keep it from catching you, and pulling you, and causing you to do things that you will regret. 

But perhaps that is not even the point. Perhaps, because it is inescapable, the point is that we have to choose how we live within the constraints that our lives present. The inevitable reality is that we will lose “innocences” in our life. It is absolutely unavoidable. We will lie, and cheat, and beg for forgiveness that we don’t deserve over and over again. But we will also love, and be loved, and forgive, and somewhere in between the tension of those two realities of giving and receiving grace, I think that there is an innocence that never really left us, but was only forgotten as we lived, and experienced, and felt all that the world offers.

Even in the unanswerable and the questions that we are left with here, we must remember that we have to decide to hold on to the part of ourselves that gets lost, but we also have to remember that it never really leaves us. We must decide that it is more important to let our hearts and minds be permeated with purity so that, for all of the corruption and pain that we face, we can still hold on to a kindness, a forgiveness, and an innocence that will never be truly lost.

Photo Credit

[haleegaff-blog]

Wandering.

Check out this post on The Quiet Noise of an Undergrad Podcast!

In life we want the absolute...

The definitive, the unwavering, the unambiguous.

But absolute what you ask? Absolute truth? Certainty? Fact? Perfection?

Or just the belief that there is an absolute and that if we search for it long enough, we will find it and it will be enough and we will not have to continue in our uncomfortable wandering?

But is there an absolute to wandering?

Life is about the journey, not the destination, they say.

If that is true, why do we even talk about the destination? This idea of an absolute if we are never going to be able to reach it?

As a child, you found the excitement in everything, and no season was too bitter for you to not wander outside into the unknown; nothing could prevent you from wandering. Even when you were confined to the walls of your room, you wandered. In and out of the pages of stories. In and out of the conversations of your action figures and stuffed animals and dolls. In and out of the dreams that woke you crying and the mornings when you were too excited for the day to sleep past 5am.

But somewhere in the midst of all of those ins and outs, we begin to stop wandering. Our eyes begin to open wider not in wonder and excitement, but in fear and realization of the world that we are living in.

We have experiences that shake us, we meet people that change us, we lose things we thought we’d have forever and all of the sudden we forget that we ever found excitement in any and every season.

We begin to complain about the weather as we discuss it with co-workers and great uncles whose names we can’t remember. Our words and our smiles become artificial because the snowflakes no longer land on our tongues gracefully but pelt our eyes painfully. The thunder no longer rings of mystery and grandeur, instead it reminds us that the sky isn’t always shining, and that our socks will probably end up soggy before the day is over.

Somewhere between learning to tie our shoes and learning to do our taxes we forgot how to interpret the act of learning as a profound experience.

Somewhere between jumping in mud puddles to make a mess on purpose and always making sure to not track mud into the house we started ignoring the symbolic truth that our lives are always a mess, and that mud pressed and dried into the rug is sometimes a part of that.

Somewhere between our youthful energy and our dear attachment to our couch, we stopped gazing up at the trees, the sky, the world, and all that it holds.

Somewhere between wandering through each day and finding everything exciting and wandering through each day anticipating its end, we began to long for different things.

We no longer longed for the astonishing, because it became easier just to see the mundane.

We no longer longed for the innocence, because we realized nothing is.

We no longer wished for morning to come quicker, but for the alarm clock to forget to blare its cry.

We have forgotten how to listen for the music in everything; to wonder if perhaps, the mundane does not mean that it cannot still be astonishing, that a lack of purity does not prevent a sort of captivating wildness, and that perhaps the alarm is singing a song of the hopefulness of a new day, and that perhaps we are too stubborn to understand a world of upbeat and anticipative symbols that do reveal that though nothing may be absolute, there is a delight in the comfort and discomfort of simply wandering.

Reality hit us at some point and reality scared us and sometimes reality becomes so paralyzing that we don’t even know how to live.

Perhaps this, these words, this quiet noise, can be a symbol, an opportunity to wonder, at where your life stands; at where you stand beneath the snow, beneath the thunder, beneath the trees...how do you interpret the seasons? How do you live? How do you wander?

[haleegaff-blog]

Tunnels.

As a young child, long car rides along wide roads to wider places were always incredibly alluring. If asked the best way to travel long distances, my answer would always be by car. The pace is slower than a plane, so you’re sure to not miss anything, and the locations and opportunities you are met with far exceed those presented when traveling through the clouds.

The best part of long car rides were always the tunnels. You know, the really long ones through mountains, with dimmed yellow lights, and one way passages. The entire way you try to hold your breath, and while you’re attempting to not let your exhale be heard by your siblings (because you simply cannot hold your breath for that long), your mind dances around the number of possibilities that could happen in that tunnel. Your car could break down, resulting in a necessary trek, by foot, to the light. There could be a car accident, where the vehicles have no where to spin off to, and the smoke is so contained that flames burst with nowhere to escape to. Or, whatever is above you and around you, whatever forced this gaping hole to be made so that people could travel, could suddenly, beginning with trickles of dust and dirt from above, crash around you, leaving you to know nothing, not even what was on the other side.

In life, we are met with tunnels. Things that intrigue us, adventures that allure us, challenges that face us down, and dark passages that we are given the opportunity to walk through and conquer.

Doris Lessing, renowned novelist and Nobel Prize winner, writes in her short story, “Through the Tunnel,” of a tunnel that one boy decided to go through. Not because he had to, not because he was asked to, not because of any reason that could ever be fully understood outside of himself, but because he needed to know what was on the other side and he needed to know if he was capable of finding out.

This is metaphorical, of course, because what is on the side of this underwater tunnel is, naturally, more water. What the protagonist also finds though, is a sense of accomplishment and pride in himself. He did it. To fill whatever void, to satisfy whatever deeper desire lied within him, for whatever reason: this boy conquered his tunnel because he needed to. Because for exactly how he is wired, for exactly how his threads were stitched, and for exactly how he was designed, he needed to be faced with that opportunity--that obstacle--and he needed to be able to find the courage within himself to at least attempt to make it through, even if it would kill him, because to him, the risk was absolutely worth it.

I cannot decide if the hardest part is deciding to go through the tunnel, or if the hardest part is exerting the effort necessary to come out the other side once you’re actually within the confines of the tunnel.

Whatever the case, I cannot ignore the tunnels that end up in my road.

As a child, there were more tunnels that enticed me. I wanted to be challenged, I wanted to prove myself, and I wanted to be something.

Although my priorities have continually changed throughout my years, as a human being, I will never be able to lose the traces of those feelings which are, primarily, human, and innately planted within the souls of all individuals.

As a young child, tunnels were the most exciting part of a long car ride, and although my tunnels today still seem too great to go through, I cannot deny my thirst to prove myself, and my desire to take on challenges and to become something and until a tunnel collapses in on me or until a tunnel is able to destroy me, I will keep journeying through. Though my pace may change, and my courage may waver, I will keep moving through them, until I reach the other side.

[haleegaff-blog]

Classrooms.

Sitting, back rigid, eyes fixated on two eyes and a mouth that is sharing, and sharing, and sharing, staged in front of a bare wall, legs begging to be stretched, but remain fixed in their bent position.

Sitting, back against cushions, legs tucked underneath oneself, blanket strewn about, warm lighting, warmer air, eyes wandering, and a mind fixated on one too many things.

In today’s world, you could get a degree completely online, and some choose to do that, but is that preferable? Does that make the most sense?

In my own experience, the classroom offers the stimulation of a focused environment, and the tangible resource of a teacher that you are face to face with. There is an expectation in the classroom, and that expectation is to learn and to devote your attention to the subject matter at hand.

When you experience a class online, it is quite different. The environment can be anywhere and distractions are often much more readily available. Although a mind can wander in a classroom, and often does, a mind in the confines of a comfortable place, tends to wander more, at least mine does.

Sitting down at my desk to “go” to class on Tuesday night, a few things were immediately different than if I had actually gone to class.

First, I would have been very, very late had this been an actual class. When learning is on my time, it is never “on” time, because the only time is to get it done in time, and so you have to create time. Second, in my cozy dorm room I was allured by a warm bed and warm lights and the smells of essential oils wafting up from my diffuser. Sleep was calling out to me, and it was incredibly inviting. Third, noises drifted up and down the hallways, and the conversation was also alluring. I could crack my door and eavesdrop, or I could open my door fully and invite conversation.

Although I can be late to class when it’s in a classroom, I can be allured by exhaustion during a night class, and I can be provoked by distractions, learning in a classroom limits the undesirable results of those things.

As long as I can walk through the door and get myself to class, I can know that in one hour and fifty minutes, I will be walking out of that same door again. There is a promise from the clock, no matter how slowly its minutes tick by. When I am forced to make time to create my own classroom, the minutes dedicated to my work end up fragmented, blurry, and broken apart by so many things. My focus is never entirely dedicated to my objective.

Even if I am tired in class, the fluorescent lights and rigid chairs force me to remain awake, so long as I don’t let my head descend upon the table, which in and of itself is not entirely inviting, and thus, not usually problematic.

Finally, although there are inevitable distractions in a classroom--someone’s shifting in their chair (it is rigid after all, who can blame them?), or an assignment due later that night, or even the sound of the wind outside--the stimulation of the classroom reminds the wandering mind of its purpose in that rigid chair: to learn and to listen, because I paid to sit in that seat and to listen to that professor. When I am in my room, the place where I laugh with friends, watch Netflix, and fall asleep to the sounds and smells of serenity, my mind is confused about its purpose there, but one thing that it knows I do not do in my haven: class.

Thus, when faced with the opportunity, I know that my weak mind needs the classroom, no matter how inviting the cushion may be, I, myself, must yield to the rigid back of a seat that has been made to be continually shifted in.