On Chasing After One's Hat

At 11:56 pm, in the second floor lounge of my dorm, there are kids finding corners to skype their friends in semi-privacy.   Above me, on the third floor balcony, there is a girl enjoying her cup-o-noodles over a collage of papers.  I am out here debating on whether to make this a late night or an early morning.

 700 words stand between me and my pillow.  They are due at 9:30 am tomorrow morning. I will punch, tear, or coax my way through them if need be.

Starting assignments is the longest part of the process for me, because I love titles.  When I interviewed for the scholarship that I didn't get, but inadvertently led to my life being what it now beautifully is, I spent half of the hour I was given choosing a title and a font for the essay I was prompted to write.

As I said, I didn't get the scholarship.  I did, however, end up getting two jobs and some of the best friends I could possibly imagine out of it.  I'm now extremely grateful not to have gotten that scholarship, because I think it might have ruined me.  It would have given me a sense of responsibility toward some sort of greatness that I wasn't ready for.  I'm afraid I might have felt pressured to reach for Greatness in a strictly academic, bullet-point sense, and that would have ruined me in the quietest and cleanest way possible.

But back to my grief when it comes to beginnings. After I have a title, everything follows.  Everything flows.  I have to give my piece a hat, or the rest of the outfit just doesn't come to me.

Sometimes I feel like this is how a lot of us entered education.  We were told to pick a title.  Business, Mathematics, Architecture, Music Performance, Journalism -- we were told to pick a hat.  There is no room for a man of many different hats, or a man of indecisive hats.  If you find that your hat doesn't fit, if it flies off in the wind, you need to chase it down, or find a new hat in a hurry.  I wonder when education began to be a game of chasing after one's hat.

Within the past year, due to various time crunches, I've had to do the impossible: begin without a title.  And, do you know what I've found?
By the end of the paper, a title just crops up.  Like an excavated artifact which could not have been identified without the beginning of some digging and dusting, the purpose develops out of the ideas and connections that interest me.  The title was there all along, but I had to begin without knowing its name.

I'd like to think that there are things worth chasing besides our own titles.

I have seen people with well-thought-out life plans meet the same ends as those who go through life with little or no clue about the next bend in the journey.  I have seen both end up stumbling upon what they love to do,  which directs them along a path they could not have possibly foreseen.  (And isn't this the best any of us could possibly hope for?) This is a path that is far better than one they could have devised on their own.  And I think it's quite possible that the best titles are stumbled upon on the way towards what inspires and captures us.

What if we thought of our education less like a well-put-together outfit suitable for the public eye, and more like a newborn... to be nurtured, cherished, and christened only after it has been fully formed and is ready to leave the womb.  When I leave this place, my education will be messy, scared, and still always, continually growing.  Yet, my hope is that it will be more complex and alive and inspired than any hat could ever hope to be.

Success

I know garbagemen happier than graduates.

In the Fight

Some ride horseback, some have jets that fly

I feel like the things that happened today were supposed to be teaching me something.

God, if only I knew what that was.

We are Snails, Longing for Eternity

Every time my sister stays with me, she leaves a few things behind in random, yet obvious, places.  

I make a pile of them as I find them.  Usually, they are small.  A hairclip, some papers, and usually at least one item no one should ever lose track of.  Undoubtedly, a shirt or two will also linger behind.  I try them on.  We have different tastes, so her clothes on me look like someone attempted to dress a beanie baby in 80’s Barbie clothes.

This time, it’s a few pages of comics, guitar tabs, some euros, and her passport.  A few flashcards from studying for her MCLEX test lie scattered under the desk.  I will keep one to put in my makeshift scrapbook of objects that help me remember what has happened in a year.  Things of absolutely no intrinsic value are the only things I’m interested in keeping.  Things of value make me nervous.  I’m always relieved when they break or are lost.

I glance at the growing pile, a monument to … forgetfulness?  Unlikely.  To what, then?

I do not waste time wondering why she habitually leaves things behind.  No one wonders why there are messages on cave walls or graffiti beneath overpasses.  No one wonders why there are pyramids or why there are roadside crosses or graveyards or world records.  It is for the same non-reason I once wrote tiny initials on the fake leather of my bus seat in high school.  Each of us can only be in one location and one time; all of humanity is in rebellion against this undefeatable condition.  Knowing that we must move on, and knowing that someday time moves on without us, we are compelled to leave traces of ourselves behind.

Maybe this is why people have children.

As I dust surfaces and straighten bed covers, I recall a question Carl Sandburg asked in his poem Haze.

Is it only a fishbone on the beach?  Is the red heart of man only ashes?  Is the flame of it all a white light switched off and the power house wires cut?

He questions the temporariness of life.  The poem is about the cycles of humanity, the past and future mingling like a sunset on the horizon.  He ends the poem ,

Why do the prairie roses answer every summer?  Why do the changing repeating rains come back out of the salt sea wind-blown? Why do the stars keeps their tracks? Why do the cradles of the sky rock new babies?

listing natural cycles of rebirth.  As if to say, “I don’t understand why, but I know that this is not the end.”