The benefit of the doubt.....or something like that

I know, I know....it's been a long time.

I had an interesting experience last night that taught me about forgetting. I went out with a good friend from high school. While we were talking and catching up, she mentioned that she had seen an old boyfriend of hers and recounted a humorous exchange they had. The third member of our party didn't go to high school with us and didn't know who he was or why the story was relevant. My friend quickly helped her out.

"Mark doesn't like him at all," she whispered conspiratorially. The friend looked at me for confirmation.

At this moment, I did a mental double-take. It was true that in our high school days, I had vehement feelings against this particular person. My friend was in relationship with him and he hurt her very, very much (even for high school). Feeling the protector, I was quick to demonize him as a no-good, manipulating blowhard. However, at this point--five years later--time had healed my once-fervent dislike of this person. I of course hadn't forgotten what he had done to my friend, but she herself had healed and moved on, as had I. I was even a little surprised to remember that I did have such strong feelings.

I was a little bit troubled by this experience. I am someone who tends not to forget things. I'm good at remembering names and (unfortunately) people who have done things to hurt those I love. In this case, everyone involved had moved on, and I wish I had made it clear that I was included in "everyone." While this was an innocent reminiscing experience, it made me think of how I remember people and what they've done--even those who haven't been the perpetrator of a heinous offense (like me in this story). I certainly don't want to be remembered as "the one who hated your old boyfriend," and it made me want to give people the benefit of the doubt more often. Just because someone said or did something that may have been hurtful, I'm not in charge of remembering it just in case the need ever arises to pull it out of my arsenal of past experiences to use against them. It made me want to be optimistic about the possibility of change.

What Works and What Doesn't

About 24 hours ago, I was putting together a lesson plan for a class I teach. For the first two days of this class, I tried to create my plans from scratch. This was clearly not the most efficient way to do thing, as it took me three or four hours to do one fifty-minute plan. But I was determined to do it on my own so I pushed through it. I was also completely miserable. I finally put my pride on the shelf and asked a much more experienced instructor for her lesson plans. Now it takes me half the time to examine the prepared lesson plans and tweak them to my own style and preference.

Lesson #1 from this experience: most people (and certainly God ) are more than willing to help if you just ask.

Back to 24 hours ago.

The lesson plan was going a little bit slower than usual this night, even with the help of the already-made plans I used as a base. For the big activity in the middle of the lesson, I decided to just copy and paste the original activity since it was already "clear enough" and easy to explain without my making adjustments to my own way of teaching and explaining.

The next day--today--my lesson was going quite smoothly The class was engaged and participating. I came to the middle activity, the one I stole, for lack of a better term. As I tried to ask questions and explain the concept, I found myself fumbling. I was trying to make sense of the graph that the experienced instructor used. I paused and tried to figure it out while the class waited expectantly. Time slowed down and I'm sure my face started to redden. After I got things figured out, the students started asking questions from the chart I drew on the board. Still trying to recover, I had to think and think and think about their questions. It was a small disaster.

Lesson #2 from this experience: you really need to be yourself and do what works for you, because what works for someone else won't always be the best thing for you. If I had taken the time (24 hours ago) to revamp the chart in a way that made sense to me and a way that I could easily explain - in essence make it my own - the awkward pauses and silences and regroupings today could have been avoided. My students need me and my style to learn, not someone else's, just in the same way that the students of my instructor/benefactor needed her and her style to learn. This is a lesson that is easy to learn in this situation but a lot harder to learn in real life, I think. The feelings I had today after class were very similar to the ones I have after an experience where I knew I was trying to be someone else because I thought that would work better. But in reality, it just makes things harder and worse. It sounds really campy, but people really are basically different for a reason.

Back from Summer

This summer I took an unintended sabbatical (which is getting pretty uppity: it's not as if I'm paid for this or as if my blog has a widespread readership), which resulted from several things in including laziness, lack of stimulating topics I wanted to put my two cents in about, and.....laziness. I had some goals I achieved this summer and some that failed miserably. But that's ok. I'm sure that the summer's lessons and experiences will filter in slowly as I start writing again.

The school year starts as of today and some new adventures are starting up. I've changed jobs and have a whole new set of responsibilities and commitments. I hate change and transition, but this time I'm telling myself over and over that in a week or so, this will be the new normal and I'll be happy with it. This first week could be a doozy though.

Here's to a new school year, new goals, new people, and new experiences!

A Plug for "Sky Sailing"

I like music that makes me feel weird. There's really no other way to describe it....it's kind of a calm melancholy feeling that certain kinds of music triggers (Thomas Newman's movie soundtracks often create that feeling too). Recently, I've gotten back into Owl City, and some of their music definitely falls into that category. Whenever I start a "phase" like this I look up all sorts of background on the artists or actors or whatever it may be. While looking up Adam Young , I discovered that he created an acoustic album under the name "Sky Sailing" before forming Owl City. I really liked what I heard: it's a typical acoustic guitar sound but with a sort of Owl City-ish twist--especially the lyrics--combined with Adam Young's breathy singing voice. Happily, as I said, the lyrics are the same sort of thing as Owl City ("I'm asleep and weird things are happening to me!" as one friend has put it) but there's a sort of tweak that sets it apart from Owl City in a good way. It all sort of sounds the same, but if you're going to make everything sound the same, this is a good sound to do that with. This is really chill music to listen to while walking around on a summer day or evening. Enjoy!

Well, that was fast...or....Everyday Thing #3

It's already the end of spring term here at BYU this week. I have my final for the one class I'm taking on Thursday afternoon and I then get three more credits to add to my growing arsenal in addition to the whopping one credit I'll get for an "internship" I've done as well. It's gone by incredibly fast, even though the workload is theoretically the same as a normal semester. I realized tonight that spring semester is kind of like running at 6:30 in the morning (remember this story?). By the time you realize what the heck is going on, it's over. I hate early mornings and I am cognizant of next to nothing at 6:30 in the morning, so running is a little less painful since I barely know where I am.

Now that I'm up and awake, in a sense, I have nothing left to do but go to work from 8 - 5, read, and hang out with friends. Summer is pretty great. Would that I could take all my classes in 6-week chunks.

Subtleties in the Weather (or Everyday Thing #2)

Weather is an odd thing: not only does it have its varying degrees of hots and colds, its different kinds of rains and winds, it also has a feel and a smell to it. One of the best examples is how it can smell like Halloween once October hits. There's something in the crisp air that mixes with falling leaves, the chilly breezes, and the hoodies that haven't been worn since March that mixes all together and makes a scent that is unique to Halloween. This happens in summer too. It can smell and feel like summer. In my hometown particularly, when the wind blows right, air rolls off the Salt Lake and there's a hint of salt in the wind that mixes with the smell of freshly cut grass and other inexplicable elements to combine to make the scent of summer.

Yesterday I noticed a different kind of nuance in the weather. It's been really nice outside for days and even a few weeks now. The temperature has been perfect: right in that area where you forget to check how hot it actually is because you don't notice the temperature at all. It's even gotten up to the upper 70s without it getting out of control hot. Yesterday, however, as I emerged from one of the buildings on campus, I immediately felt different. It wasn't incredibly hot, but it just felt different. The sun on my neck felt different, somehow. I said to my friend that it felt like a different kind of heat. She remarked that the spring heat is gone and the summer heat is here. "That's it!!" I said. It sounded crazy to both of us, but it makes sense. There's some little factor that's been changed so that it now feels like summer outside and no longer spring. It could be that the temperature just increased, but I think it's more than that. It feels like it's more than that. I could strangely smell something in the air that confirmed what we had just said and consequently basked in it for the rest of my walk back to work.

This is another instance where I ask myself, Am I crazy?

Someone to Talk To

It's been a while since I've posted anything on the blog....mostly because it's been a while since anything has really made me think "Gosh, I'd like to write a post about this" or "This would make a great blog post!" While all the things on this blog are personal, there are a lot of personal things and then personal things to sift through before I get to things I want to post. So while life has continued and things have happened since my last post, it wasn't until tonight that I had something that (I feel) is worth saying.

One of my basic needs that is personal to me is a need to be understood. It's often hard for me to talk to people about how I really feel, mostly when it's something hard in my life, because I know that they can't understand it. I know they want to help me more than anything, but because I know deep down that
they can't understand, they often can't do anything, so I just opt to not say anything at all.

Another piece of information that's important in order to understand the eventual point of this post is that I've always heard people say that they know they can always talk to God about everything and anything. Whatever it was, they could tell Him about it and somehow I imagined that everything turned out all right for them after saying that. I've always known that I could talk to God about anything, but I never really felt like I got answers. I know I had answers about several big decisions in my life, so I didn't doubt that He was there, but I wondered if He really did care about the small things in my life. Even in my hardest times, I never really felt any sort of comfort that people always talked about in their testimonies or stories. I never felt any sort of warm, loving feeling, no acceptance, no understanding.

I'm sure there were a number of factors that played into my feeling that way, but I'm not sure what they were and at this point I don't care. All I know is that things have changed. It's been so gradual that I didn't realize until tonight at around midnight as I was brushing my teeth how much I was looking forward to telling God about things that happened during my day, several of them uncomfortable things that I knew (don't ask me how) that only He would understand.

In the past few months, I've started really confiding in God. I mean really confiding. There comes a point in everyone's life when they truly have nobody to talk to. Sometimes, there simply is nobody I can talk to to make things better or easier, and certainly nobody who will understand. Happily, in my moments like that, I turned to God. I've laid things out on the table for Him, told Him that this is how things are and this is what's going on and this is how I feel. I've told Him that I am not sure how I ought to react or feel but this is how I am reacting and feeling. My prayers have been becoming less formulaic and more informal. I haven't been keeping back the "knitty gritty" stuff. Actually, when I talk to God, that "knitty gritty" stuff takes up a large portion of the conversation. Slowly, I've realized that God does understand. He understands and the best part is that He's okay with everything that I feel. And even better, because I know that He is OK with it, I am OK with it and am much less hard on myself for the little things that I keep inside to reproach myself with.

So at the end of the day (and the beginning of it), God is my go-to. He's given me people in my life that I can talk to when I need one kind of support or another, of course, but sometimes, there is just nobody but God that I feel comfortable talking to, nobody but Him who will understand. It's a relief to know that I don't have to preface how I feel with anything when I talk to God because He was there when it happened.

 It's really important to realize that this took a long time. I've also realized that this took a long time for probably every person who I ever heard say that they felt they could really talk to God and He understood them. I certainly haven't been there for all the times when they felt alone or wondered if God cared about the little things in their life. How can I expect to understand? I heard the end, or at least most recent, result of their experiences and I expected to get to that same point in a few days or fewer.

It's also important to realize that, even though God does understand and that brings me a lot of quiet comfort that can often go unnoticed, my problems do not go away as I expected and hoped when I heard people tell their stories. That wouldn't really make much sense. How on earth can I expect to overcome the problems if a few prayers and soulful confidence in God takes them away? No, because they are still present, that helps me remember my dependence on His constancy. And, while I still am not grateful for all the trials I have, I am grateful for the things that they have brought me, one of which is an answer to a long-asked question: Yes, God is there and He does care and (most of all for me) He does understand. That knowledge is something that is worth a lot to me and something that I hope I can always remember.