horses elliott

I feel like the structure of my life was shaken to its core.  Whatever I built up has fallen down and I have had to rebuild.


What happened?  A lot of things have culminated to bring this to pass, but the thing that really rocked me and started everything shaking happened today when my teacher discussed Mrs. Dalloway.  He taught us that the philosophy really proposed in this book is that of existentialism.  What an existentialist believes is that this life is all there is.  Our souls are really only here for a brief minute and we have to make our lives what they mean; we have to find our own purpose and meaning.  So, if you felt like this life is all there is, and you wanted to make something of it, what would you do?  What would you do to make it meaningful and worth living?  I think the answer is go out and do good things- experience tons of things, feel everything, be good to other people, do acts of love for others, and essentially, seize the day.  "There's only one life to live- make the most of it..."  So this way of living really resonated with me.  Okay, but here is where the kicker came for me-


Compare this with a life with a religious take on eternity and the immortal soul.  What is their philosophy?  Life is a test.  Life is simply a brief moment on the great eternities, stretching out forever before us and behind us.  It tells us that our purpose is to have families and be responsible.  A life that is not stable like that does not really fit snugly in a religious environment, right?


All of a sudden, when my mind newly labeled the first philosophy "existentialism" and then compared it to this (all of a sudden) fresh perspective on religious philosophy, I realized that I have been more and more living and thinking like an existentialist (everything has been about experiencing and experimenting).  I didn't know I had been doing that, and I don't know what it is about labeling, but all of a sudden I realized that my ideas on life fit inside someone else's box and it became something that I could step back and look at.


So, I was there looking at my life, and we kept talking about the book, and other thoughts came to me that I had recently had.


First, was from the book- one of the amazing parts of the way Mrs. Dalloway was written is that each paragraph that follows a character's thoughts really shows the way a human being thinks.  We don't just have a steady, flowing train of thought all the time; our thoughts usually jump from idea to idea because of whatever outside stimuli is around us.  And in fact, our thoughts can be completely inconsistent with each other from one thought to the next.  For example, I can think, "I have become a very collected and calm driver,"  get cut-off by another person on the road, and then think, in a sort of rage, "Stupid people should not be allowed to drive."  This is usually topped-off with a bird.  E.  A person that substitute-taught today spelled "beautiful" like this (and this is really true, and he did it thinking it was correct): "beautE-ful."  Haha the E was capitalized and the hyphen was there and everything.


So our thoughts jump around, and so do our circumstances change.  So do our philosophies on life.  In fact, there are so many philosophies in the world that have been used and discarded that it's a wonder we don't find a way to use them as an energy source in cars.  Really, you can't show me a single philosophy for life that doesn't have some hole in it or can hold up in every situation and circumstance you put it in.  Is that kind of depressing?  No one has all the answers.  All of this kind of was hard for me, too.  But then I started watching things by Spike Jonze.  He directed an amazing movie called "The Fall" and he also directed "Where the Wild Things Are" and other great films.  No matter what the movie is about, no matter what happens, the overall theme of the movie is that love trumps all, love is over all and under all and through all, through everything that matters, that has substance.  Paul said,

    "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

  And though I have the gift of  prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

  And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing."

Love is the only thing that means anything.  Last week, I watched a talk that President Eyring gave a few years ago.  He told a story of when he was a bishop of a ward, and he was helping out a man who, for years, had had problems with substance abuse and breaking the law.  The man got baptized, and a few days later, he was intoxicated by some substance and ran his car into a building.  He was okay, and when the cops came, they were trying to arrest him.  But the man said, "No, no, it's okay.  I'm a Mormon, now!  You don't have to arrest me!"


Eventually, the man got back to face President Eyring in his bishop's office.  President Eyring, on being with the man, started to become infuriated and filled with (as he thought at the time) righteous anger- he could only think of how the man had hurt the church's name and had done nothing good.  He could really only think how thoughtless and bad the man had been, and as he was filling up with this anger, getting it ready to let loose on the man, all of a sudden, something happened.  (Here, as President Eyring was talking, he started to get really emotional.)  All of a sudden, President Eyring saw the man as a child.  And he knew, in his heart and through the feelings of the Spirit, that Heavenly Father was letting him see the man as He saw him.  President Eyring realized that he had no idea what kind of hardships the man had lived through, what kind of painful experiences he had had.  He saw him as a child who was trying the best he knew how, who really, in his heart of hearts, wanted to be good.


President Eyring then said that up to that point in his life, he had been praying for charity, the pure love of Christ, and in that moment, he knew what that was, how it felt.  That was love.  That is love.


So I think how I see so many people every day.  At school.  (I think that is one thing that makes BYU so hard for me- it's just that we are supposed to be practicing a religion of love.  These are people who are definitely members and definitely supposed to be doing these things.  They don't have an excuse...well... It's just hard because I feel like people not of the same faith as me are not held to the same standards.)  The people at school don't seem to care that I am alive.  Who am I to them?  I hate that hardly anyone looks at me.  I hate that hardly any one is trying to help me smile by acknowledging me.  What, am I a spectre?


But President Eyring's story put it more in perspective.  It's this- I just don't think very many people are truly filled with love, no matter what religion they belong to.  I think it is something that is to be worked at gaining through lots of desire, asking, and sincere effort.  I also feel like charity is not up to other people.  It is up to me.  I don't need to wait to have a group of friends before I can start acting charitably.  I can do for other people what I wish they would do for me.


Can I say that I feel like I am making steps towards that end when I stop my own thoughts and really focus on a person sitting next to me?  When I wave and say hello to someone and see a smile come on their face?  When I make someone laugh?  When I show something that is important and dear to me to someone else?  It is simply a shift in attitude from me to someone else.  


An autobiography I recently read really helped me understand that shift.

The autobiography I am talking about was written by John Stuart Mills, a Victorian philosopher. His story is very remarkable in that he was basically a prodigy. Mills's father did not believe in the traditional education system, so he raised Mills and educated him himself. Mills was raised on the belief system of the utilitarians, which is simply belief in supporting “the greatest good for the greatest number”. It was a very calculating and unfeeling faith, and it was all about securing pleasure for oneself. Inside this system, Mills at first flourished, and as a genius-prodigy, he was publishing and lecturing in his teenage years and was quite prominent even at a young age. He was incredibly intelligent.

What was amazing about this story is that after a small number of years of being successful, Mills basically woke up one morning and had lost all his taste for life. He could not feel (I can think of no worse state in the entire world.  Please give me feeling, even if it's deep sorrow or pain.  Give me feeling). A deep cloud of gloom swept over him and he sunk to its depths. In his autobiography, Mills says that this cloud would not leave him for a long time- months. His life carried on like this, with him wondering if he should ever be happy again, until, while reading, he came across a fictional story of a father's death in a small family. This little story seemed to cut through the gloom and awaken in him some sympathy and finally! feeling. It helped to cause the cloud of gloom to leave, as this first emotion helped to change his attitude.  Do you see, he finally felt?

What he learned, in his own words, was this: “Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind...”

For me, I feel like my body is a machine, in a way.  My spirit is inside this shell, this machine, and the machine can work pretty well with only a small percentage of focus from my spirit.  I can let my spirit kind of wander around and sulk around inside my little shell without hardly ever looking out.  At those times, everything seems very hazy and almost colorless.  But then, when I make that shift, I feel like I am totally plugged into my body, experiencing everything that my body can experience.  I am plugged into my hands, I can see colors vividly, I can think straight, my feet are gripping the earth, and my ears are filled with beautiful music that dances all through my being.  That shift is completely outward.  That shift is seeing a need and filling it.  That shift is not being afraid.  That shift is acts of love.  That shift is not worrying about the self.  That shift is, I will repeat it because I think it's important, outward.  It is not forgetting the self, but it is.  It's about totally being one with your self, but not doing things for your self.


This is important to me because I am tired of running in circles.  I got so, so fed up with life and the way everything was the same!  Every single time I felt like I needed to improve, I would take the exact same steps and set the exact same goals every time.  Things would work for a little while, and then they would go sour, again.  I would set the same goals, keep them for a little while, and then fall again.  I decided that that is stupid.  It is incredibly stupid.  I don't care if I am "improving myself," if i keep doing the same things over and over again, I am crazy, because it obviously isn't working.  I kept thinking, oh this time I have more dedication to my goals so I will be able to keep them.  No.  All I could think of was Thoreau asking me, "Does wisdom work in treadmills then?"  And Isaac Brock mocking me- "I took off running at the greatest speed/ Didn't bother looking to either side of me/...I left the hills at this point in time/ To run on treadmills in a dotted line."  Things had to change.  I had to change them.  I changed my attitude.  I changed my perspective.  Maybe it wasn't perfect, but it was change, and I am still changing.


So there is all of this, and all of this has come on the end of a couple of worrisome thoughts for me.  Do you realize that the world is a huge mess?  Sufjan Stevens made a documentary called "The BQE," and this, more than anything else I have seen, seems to be able to encapsulate my thoughts- it is finally the symbol that best captures and expands my ideas. The BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) is a road system in the outskirts of New York City that was built over a relatively long period of time.  The design (due to many difficult circumstances) is incredibly messy.  It came as a solution to the huge increase of commercial traffic in New York, but it is just jumbled and almost haphazard seeming.  Watching the documentary, I started to think how even though the road-system is not great, everything has grown and expanded around it.  There are offices and apartments and stores and warehouses and other roads all built around the BQE.  So the system is not great, but it is kind of working.  The only way to improve the system and make it more efficient would be to tear it all down and start all over.  But what would that mean?  It would mean displacing thousands and thousands of people and tearing all those offices and apartments and stores and warehouses and roads all to the ground.  There is no way that that is going to happen.  So what do those people in New York do?  They make the best of it.  They do the best they can with the system they've got.


What does that mean to me?  I have started to see and feel how the system we are living in is really not good. Yeah, we are getting food, but really, are we eating the best food we could be?  No.  Do big businesses care about us?  No.  Do companies care for anything but money?  No.  Most of us have housing, but could the system be more efficient?  Yes.  Is the system of government perfect?  Are the people in power perfect?  No.  Are morals holding up?  No.  Is there deep-seated corruption where we can't see it?  Yes.  We are living in a fallen world of imperfect systems.  We won't live in a perfect society in this life.  And this completely scared me.  I felt like I was living on top of a bubble that was about to pop, and here I was afraid for myself and so many people, and here I was wanting to revolutionize the system.  I wanted to change everything.  And here was religion telling me to just do the best I could with what I was given.  It was telling me to lead a good life- raise a good family, become stable, learn and give way to many inner changes.  I could not reconcile how big a mess the world was in with what religion was asking me to do.  What, you want to pretend the world isn't a very big mess and just live on happily ignorant of everything falling apart?


Then I heard recently that a church leader (I think it was an Apostle, but this is really information without a reliable source, as I think I am telling this as the third or fourth source) gave a talk about this in church.  He said, yes, the world is a mess, we are aware of that, but just keep on living, doing the best 
you can.


So, the church, our leaders know this world is a mess.


Then I realized why we have received the counsel we have received, and I realized it because of the BQE.  Everything, our society, is built up so much, our laws and ideas and systems are so ingrained in us and our culture that the only way to change everything would be a complete revolution.  It would mean wiping everything out, breaking everything to the ground, to bring out a more perfect system.


So a lot of things started to click for me.  I looked at existentialism.  It is a philosophy of action, and I like it (actually, I love it.  The more I live by trying to find meaning in life and in giving, the less I am bored.  I realized a couple of days ago that I have not been bored for a long time.  My mind is constantly trying to find better ways of doing things because I hate the way the world works right now), but I was giving myself too much to it.  I could absolutely not be happy inside it until everything around me was perfect- school had to be how I wanted it, my roommates had to be who I wanted, the culture had to be what I wanted it, my friends had to be what I wanted, because it was all about perfecting everything around me.  I can start living with the (again, fresh) religious outlook.  I can be happy where I am because of love.  And all of a sudden, life has meaning and purpose again.


And my friends, my family, I love you.  I would have nothing if I didn't have you.