This does NOT feel like opening presents at Christmas!

Tonight, I had the unfortunate task of opening the sealed plastic bathroom cups that each had a different bug inside that I caught in Florida before school started for a class project.  It was NOT fun.  I wasn't smart enough to label them, so I had a mini heart attack each time I opened one to find out what was inside.  One did not have anything in it.  Crap.  Where did it go?!

This is Satan the Mole Cricket.

And this is Goliath, the Wolf Spider.  GROSS.

HOPE

A few days ago, I read a talk called "Hope" by Steven E. Snow that gave me a greater understanding of what hope is and what it can do for me.

"Hope is an emotion which brings richness to our everyday lives....[it] brings a certain calming influence to our lives as we confidently look forward to future events."


I love that.

I had a lot of anxiety this past week with all the changes, turning a new leaf over, and uncertainty that's been weighing me down.  This article reminded me how hope can bring us peace and calm that we need.

Something else that I have been focusing on a lot this week is being able to recognize and listen to the Spirit.  I've been feeling pretty lost for the past month, but the one thing I know for a surety is how my faith can give me the guidance I need through personal revelation.  I heard a really awesome idea at church:

If you want to hear the still, small voice, then YOU have to be still and small.

Tuesdays with Morrie

After cleaning out all my "stuff" at home and consolidating my belongings into a few boxes I will leave behind while finishing school in Rexburg (3 more semesters!!!), I discovered that I had a copy of one of my favorite books: Tuesdays with Morrie.   

Anyway, I read it again (for the bazillionth time) and have a renewed sense of what is important in life.  For those of you who haven't read it, Mitch, a former student of Morrie Schwartz (a sociology professor), wrote this book as a "final thesis" after his last "class" with Morrie.  Morrie spent the last years of his life suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, (ALS), and Mitch visited him every Tuesday, listening to Morrie's philosophies on death and living.  Funny enough, the book on dying truly teaches you how to live.  As Morrie repeatedly states in this book, "once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

Here are some quotes from the book that I love:

"Dying," Morrie suddenly said, "is the only one thing to be sad over, Mitch.  Living unhappily is something else.  So many of the people who come to visit me are unhappy."

Why?

"Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves.   We're teaching the wrong things.  And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.  Create your own..."

"Life is a series of pulls back and forth.  You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else.  Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't.  You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. 

"A tension of the opposites, like a pull on a rubber band.  And most of us live somewhere in the middle."

Sounds like a wrestling match, I say.

"A wrestling match." He laughs.  "Yes, you could described life that way."

So which side wins, I ask?

He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth.

"Love wins.  Love always wins."

"So many people walk around with a meaningless life  They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important.  This is because they're chasing the wrong things.  

The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that give you purpose and meaning."

"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love and to let it come in."

His voice dropped to a whisper.  "Let it come in.  We think we don't deserve love, we think if we let it in, we'll become too soft.  But a wise man named Levine said it right.  He said 'Love is the only rational act.'"

"I give myself a good cry if I need it.  But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life.... I don't allow myself any more self-pity than that.  A little each morning, a few tears, and that's all."

After a girl in class fearlessly falls back with her eyes closed to have another classmate catch her, this is what Morrie had to say:

"You see," he says to the girl, "you closed your eyes.  That was the difference.  Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel.  And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too--even when you're in the dark.  Even when you're falling."

"Mitch," he said, "the culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die.  We're so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks--we're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going.  So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all?  Is this all I want? Is something missing?" 

He paused.

"You need someone to probe you in that direction.  It won't just happen automatically."

I knew what he was saying.  We all need teachers in our lives.

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." - Henry Adams

"The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family. It's become quite clear to me as I've been sick.  If you don't have the support and love and caring and concern you get from a family, you don't have much at all.  Love is so supremely important.  As our great poet Auden said, 'Love each other or perish....' Without love, we are birds with broken wings."

"There is no experience like having children.  That's all.  There's no substitute for it.  You cannot do with with a friend.  You cannot do it with a lover.  If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children."

"You know what the Buddhists say? Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent."

But wait, I said.  Aren't you always talking about experiencing life?  All the good emotions, all the bad ones?

"Yes."

Well, how can you do that if you're detached?

"Ah, You're thinking, Mitch.  But detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you.  On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully.  That's how you are able to leave it."

I'm lost.

"Take any emotion--love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness.  If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid.  You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief.  You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.
"But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely.  You know what pain is.  You know what love is.  You know what grief is.  And only then can you say, 'All right.  I have experienced that emotion.  I recognize that emotion.  Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment."

I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life.  How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry.  Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don't say anything because we're frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
Morrie's approach was exactly the opposite.  Turn on the faucet.  Wash yourself with emotion.  It won't hurt you.  It will only help.  If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, "All right, it's just fear, I don't have to let it control me.  I see it for what it is."
Same for lonliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely--but eventually, be able to say, "All, right, that was my moment with loneliness.  I'm not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I'm going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I'm going to experience them as well."
"Detach," Morrie said again.

"...It is impossible for the old not to envy the young.  But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that.  This is your time to be in  your thirties.  I had my time to be in my thirties, and now is my time to be seventy-eight.
"You have to find what's good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now.  Looking back makes you competitive.  And, age is not a competitive issue."

"Status will get you nowhere.  Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone."

"In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right?  And at the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right?"
His voice dropped to a whisper.
"But here's the secret: in between, we need others as well."

"That's what we're all looking for.  A certain peace with the idea of dying.  If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing."
Which is?
"Make peace with living."

"Death ends a life, not a relationship."

"In business, people negotiate to win.  They negotiate to get what they want.  Maybe you're too used to that.  Love is different.  Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own."


So there you have it!  Some (just some!) of my favorite quotes from this book.  This time around, I learned a great deal about how to soak in emotions instead of keeping them "under wraps" as well as how important each day is.  I want to get into the habit of visualizing my days as Ghandi does: when you sleep, you die.  When you wake up, you are reborn.  I want to feel reborn every day, to turn over a new leaf, get my head out of the past, and look forward to the bright day ahead of me.