Making the Unthinkable Personal

I was in the fifth grade. One of my friends told me that her parents had been watching something scary on the television, and she was worried about it as we locked up our bikes and headed into the school.

The faculty at our school knew something big was happening, something that would have impact on the lives of their students from the oldest to the very youngest, and a decision was made to postpone class so we could watch the news. Our teachers gathered us into a room with a television, and from there we sat on the floor, wide-eyed and confused, as first one tower fell, then the next.

It was surreal. The grownups all had tears in their eyes, so we thought we should be crying too. But what was it we were seeing? How could we connect our little eleven-year old worlds of make-believe and recess with a world-wide tragedy?

We couldn't. I know for myself I hadn't really grasped the pain of a single death yet--hadn't been able to really ponder what it means when one country goes to war with another. How could I grasp the pain of deaths of hundreds of thousands? It would take me days of watching somber memorials, amateur documentaries, and angry politicians before I began to really think: this is big. Something big happened this week.

Ten years later, I will watch that same image again--on my computer, on the televisions, in my classrooms and around the world--and part of me will go back to sitting on the carpet of my elementary classroom, to the bewilderment and looking to the adults with somber eyes for some indication of how to feel, how to react. I feel like those in my generation and younger, the ones who were just kids when the towers fell, have had to relearn the tragedy every single year. I feel like too often we forget that we're at war, or forget that this is a day of deep loss and profound consequence. Because it didn't necessarily shake our own worlds then, we sometimes push aside that day in our minds, making it all the more necessary for it to shake us up a little now.

But then again, can we really forget? Our teachers didn't know how right they were when they talked of how this would affect us. It's my generation now that trains for deployment. Kids my age, several of whom friends from high school, are the ones fighting and dying daily. It is my generation that will someday take the reins in government, and it is our responsibility to never forget the way the adults handled this day and the years afterward. It is my generation that had to grow up without family members and many without parents, my generation that has to figure out how to react when a helicopter of special troops is shot down, or when Osama was found and killed. My generation for which this day will only continue to become more and more personal the older we get.

We owe it to the future generations and to ourselves to treat this day with weight and with purpose. As we go through today and revisit those images we couldn't comprehend as children, may we strive to make them personal to us, and honor those who have been lost and will continue to be lost for that moment ten years old today.



*images by Google*

The Importance of WONDER

Santiago Ramon y Cajal, one of the founders of modern neuroscience concepts, famously said:

"How many interesting facts fail to be converted into fertile discoveries because their first observers regarded them as natural and ordinary things! It is strange to see how the populace, which nourishes its imagination with tales of witches or saints, disdains the world around it as commonplace, monotonous and prosaic, without suspecting that at bottom it is all secret, mystery, and marvel."

Secret. Mystery. Marvel. Most adults can't remember exactly the first time we experienced snowfall or rain, or the first time we saw something we couldn't explain and stood in puzzled silence before a caterpillar, a dead bird, a boat in the gutter, a train, or a roller coaster. What were these things? What were they made out of? How much trouble might you get in for touching one? Long ago we made and ate mud pies, ran through sprinklers on the lawn, stood in awe and wonder before a firework show or a sunset. But how many of us do that today?

I remember the first time I got a pair of contacts. I was in Jr. High and was used to things being blurry. I got used to not seeing the board. Got used to trees being green blobs and waiting for a friend to get close enough for their expressions to go from fuzzy to clear. When I walked out of the optometrists with my new eyes, I was in shock. I could see colors again! Grass! Birds! Loose gravel in the road! Road signs! People's faces came into focus from across a crowded hall, I was able to get a driver's license, and I would literally stop and stare at trees--pine trees, oak trees, shrubs or aspens--for long moments, making everyone around me think I was mad I'm sure. (There goes the girl who stares at trees!)

Over time of course, this sense of seeing everything for the first time again faded. It took only a matter of days before I began taking for granted that my vision was improved and these things could be seen once more. I had lost my ability to WONDER.

"The only thing we require to be good philosophers it the faculty of wonder," Jostein Gaarder wrote in his philosophical novel Sophie's World. Sophie is a young girl who keeps getting the most mysterious letters from an unknown philosopher that is insistent that she not grow to adulthood dull to the sense of wonder. "For various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background...to children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course."

The picture I have posted here is one I took while in Peru on a humanitarian trip. The children gather around Gary, one of the amazing men in our group, to stare in wonder at the camera he has and the images it has captured. I realized as I took this picture that many of us had forgotten to wonder about cameras. We knew that they worked. We knew what they did. And we stopped wondering about the HOW or the WHY. For the kids in Urubamba who didn't see cameras regularly or ever operate one before, these were important questions.

How sad, Gaarder writes, that we as a species grow so numb to our surroundings. We would rather discuss the price of tomatoes, or some gossip about celebrities than spend any amount of time dwelling on the grotesque, the shocking, the difficult things that are daily a part of the lives of others. We get used to things being blurry. War? What's that? Well, we're in one aren't we? Been part of one for over ten years now, and yet it seems to have no holding in our day to day concerns. Politics, hunger, genocide, corruption...these things seem too big or too abstract for much of the world, and particularly Americans, to really gain an understanding and an empathy for.

That's not to say we don't have worries, because of course, we do. We worry about our eduction. About work and rent and social status. We worry about being liked and we worry about being disliked. We sweat all of the small stuff, in great degree, and somehow forget that we aren't the only ones here. Usually it takes something big to snap out of our own worlds and SEE. There is some scary stuff out there. There are people who hate us enough to attack us. There are people so hungry they readily steal, kill, and ravage their neighbors for food. How much time do we spend wondering about our place in all that? Wondering if we're just too small to make a ripple in that big wet mess? Wondering if there's something we can do?

Recently I went out searching for more families for the Food Bank program here at the college. I visited with the ones from last year and was shaken by what I saw. The majority of them had lost jobs over the summer. Some were facing eviction. Some were working full time with too many children to care for. All were in debt, either
monetarily and emotionally. I had wondered how they were doing during the break, but not enough. Now I have too many things to wonder about them. These are families I have come to love and know well, and I wonder where they'll be in a year. In two? In ten? I wonder what my part is in all this. I wonder if anything I can do will ever help enough.

This kind of wondering makes you want to fight back. Makes you want to do something. There are many other kinds of wondering, but this is the primary one I wish we as a society would never lose. Unfortunately I know that even as this incident stays in my thoughts this week or this month, eventually it will fade and be replaced by more current trials. Eventually, I'll stop wondering.

I wish I could say there was an easy way for human beings to halt the progress of our societal amnesia. Wish we could just decide to stop forgetting and taking our lives for granted. Would it make us hyper sensitive to death and birth and little miracles? Or would it make us simply more aware and altruistic? I wish I knew.

If you're reading this, take the time to wonder about something today, and see if it changes your day, and if even for just a moment, you can feel something new again.

A Thousand Words

There are some compromises I just won't make.

I thought my blog was pretty ok, maybe even lovely, up until I started taking a web page designing class this term. For a week now I have tried to write and loathed the interface, the plainness of the background, the colors and fonts and setup that only seven days ago I took no issue with. I decided to overhaul. Like many things in life, sometimes you come to a point where you just have to smash things. Tear apart your house and remodel it! Throw away all the junk in your closet! Crumple up that draft and start again! It's a kind of purging I think everybody experiences at least once in their lives. A restlessness we probably inherited from generations past of nomads who wandered the globe, uprooting everything familiar to try to survive anew.

I embraced that ancient side of me today and re-created my blog, going through and deleting or re-arranging some of the old posts and updating everything I could. But that is only the surface. I also want to start changing the content. For two years now I have rambled on here about various issues, experiences, school assignments and frustrations that were personally important to ME and me alone. I want to still write the occasional personal post, but I will strive to not be so shallow the next time. If I'm going to write about the hard stuff, might as well go deep. The rest of my posts I'm going to try to focus on things that matter to more than just me. Things in our community, things in the world, things that just have WEIGHT.

Hopefully this transformation will be for the better, and you'll be patient with me as I try to stretch some journalistic legs.

As for the picture--I chose it purposefully. My Junior year of high school I was blessed with the opportunity to see some of Europe. This picture was taken during our last week there, during the dawning of a beautiful day on the coast of Italy. We were high up in the mountains at a hotel that was more of an old house, and for whatever reason I woke up earlier than most of our group and opened the shutters to take a look outside. This view literally took my breath away. I'm not even sure I started breathing again until I had taken as many pictures as I could of the rolling fog, the flowers, and the hills fading into each other as far as I could see.

That trip reminded me what it means to have a life and to live it. It exposed me to cultures and ideas and beauty that I could not have imagined. Four years later, I am a Junior again. And after spending two years in the dark with depression it was high time for another reminder that there is life out there, and it needs to be LIVED.

Keep strong out there world,
Sincerely,
Robyn

Things Are Happening Here

Things are happening here. Right here. Right now. At the College of Idaho.



This morning I attended a leadership retreat in our cafeteria building with dozens of other students involved in resident life, campus ministry, student government, senate, and club leadership. I went into the meeting considering the weight of leadership and my personal part in everything, and came out with the realization that having authority shouldn't be about you, and your contributions or failures, it is about the group. The sum of a group's parts are so much greater than the whole. And today I finally understood what it means to be on the other end, the background people who plan and sweat and barter to make something bigger than themselves come to life.



I realize that this is basic, grade-school knowledge. When you get broken up into a team as a child you know how you're supposed to act (don't yell over each other, don't hit anybody, try to work together) and what will happen. You know natural leaders and followers will emerge, you know you will have to make a decision to be one or the other. You know there will be some kind of bargaining and argument but in the end, you present something that you all made more or less together. Sometimes I guess these lessons get fuzzy or forgotten with age.



On my wobbly Freshmen legs two years ago I started looking for ways to fulfill service hour requirements for my scholarships, and I met Israel. I was not looking for big commitments and I especially wasn't looking to lead. Izzy is a student at my college who created a revolutionary kind of service organization on campus that takes leftover food from our cafeteria and delivers it weekly to families in need in our area. Dubbed the Food Bank, this club was made because Izzy had lived in areas where he saw people who struggled, and he wanted to do something about it. I was impressed by him and his ideas and signed on as a driver.



Three years later, his club has helped nearly two dozen families in Nampa and Caldwell, and at the end of last term, he passed his torch to me.



It would be a total lie to say I hadn't hoped for the position, after two years of running deliveries and meeting the families and falling in love with the program. But I wasn't prepared for the responsibilities, the legwork, and all of the decision making that comes with being a leader. Anyone could tell you I'm not exactly leader material. I am shy and often quiet, I tend to agree rather than argue in discussions and I prefer to melt into a group, letting someone take the reins and working hard at whatever position I need to fill. I have only ever led a group in one other case, as President of History Club in high school, when my history teacher believed in me enough to make me believe in myself and agree to start something great. We ended up doing big things in that club, including a two week trip to Europe, a year of hard fund-raising, writing letters to students halfway around the world, and doing a humanitarian project for a school in Africa.



But when I look back on these events, it's almost as if I'm standing on the outside, observing them from somewhere or someone else. Yes I had a hand in all of it, but I attribute the credit to Danny and Peter, my fellow-Presidents I elected to lead with me to share the responsibility. I attribute the bigger things like the Europe trip to the participants who made it possible, the faculty who helped structure it, and those who volunteered at fund raisers. I can't pick out anything that I did completely alone that was crucial to those successes, or any instance when my leadership was outstanding or memorable. I was just there. And things sort've...happened.



For most of college I have preferred this fly-on-the-wall participation of everything from dances and concerts to sports events and class projects. There were moments where I had to stand on a proverbial podium and show the world what I had to offer: an improvised jazz solo, a fifteen minute presentation in psychology, sitting with strangers at lunch and becoming friends by the time we stood up to put trays away. These are common, every day growing moments for college people. But this year is the first time I am actively participating in things. Being a part of all of this requires me to be braver than normal and more outgoing than I'm comfortable with and more...just more.



This is good =) This is the year--the year where things are (finally) going to be different



Thank God!



*image of College of Idaho campus, taken by me*