Hope and Its Burden

Okay, Vegas stories to come for all you patient chickadees, but there's other things I'd like to say first about the inauguration, if you'll allow me a rather circuitous route to it...

Life has a way of changing what I think of it constantly, especially regarding its purpose. As a child, I can remember being very moment-to-moment about my goals in life. My purpose was always some tangible thing or translatable abstraction--from being a scientist and curing cancer to having a life philosophy of tolerance, it was all very clearly defined, straightforward, and completely rationalized. At some point in my teen years, I lost all forms of faith and optimism, realizing that the forms of spirituality in my life were clogged with human failings and childish obedience rather than any real understanding of hope. I'm sure you all have undergone similar questioning periods or ambivalent stages in your life regarding what you are really here to accomplish, even if they were not so pronounced or disruptive as mine or perhaps more so. We all eventually have to realize that our state of understanding is in constant flux if we are ever to come to terms with our own failings and achieve any kind of real wisdom.

Not that I claim any kind of real wisdom; I am only just now coming to the full understanding that what I think now will eventually be usurped by another thought and that I will never achieve any final pinnacle of awareness. There is no final pinnacle after all, and no better or worse. No, what I am trying to say is that I'm just now coming to the understanding that the purpose of my life, in this moment at least, is evolution (And before you say anything... I don't mean a biological evolution, Jeff ;)). If you pay attention, you'll see a pattern of reoccurrences in your life. Every time a situation arises it provides you an opportunity to react however you want. When you refuse to change how you react, you do not evolve but only continue to perpetuate the cycle. If you break the cycle, new opportunities can arise for you to grow and evolve in new ways. The funny thing is, no one has to be conscious of this pattern and often your growth occurs in a sub-conscious state, but if you pay attention to it, you can start to control it.

I could go into my latest thoughts on life here, but without belaboring the point this last summer I started to see this pattern in a different way than I had before. Deliberately, I pulled myself away from the path that I had found myself on, and stepped outside of the cycle. Albeit, I did it in a fairly comfortable way--with a job that was relatively easy to get (due to strong connections and actual experience I had never realized I had) and that provided me with a short term guarantee of not having to figure out what else to do. My outright, conscious goal with this job was to push my limits of my self-definition, primarily socially. What happened was a strange shift. I discovered that the social definition was a piece of cake to alter, but multiple other aspects of my life shifted far more drastically than I had even dreamed. Somehow, I am now absurdly optimistic compared to the girl I was six months ago. I am happier, healthier, more stable, and so much more in control of my life that most of my anxiety about my future career has become a flimsy shadow of what it once was.

So there's a personal reason that when I sit in my hotel rooms alone with my TV, I start bawling every time I listen to Obama give a speech. It's not that I agree with everything he says, or expect that things will change overnight, it's that the rhetoric he uses meshes so completely with the experience I've had lately. He speaks about the evolution of America, with the obvious example of the gradual change from slavery to an African American president, but he carries it on into the future. While the last 8 years have been about staying the course and fighting any threat to our way of life as if America was a static nation, Obama is explicitly working at changing our way of life while retaining the principles that made us great. America is an ideal, one that may never be fully realized but one that we can strive towards, and while there is real work to be done, Obama's optimism regarding the ideology of our country is absolutely refreshing. After all, I have learned the value of being optimistic over the last few months... Less things go wrong when you optimistically know that it will all work out, if only because you automatically make space in your mind to react rather than anticipate and therefore can rectify any situation far faster.

His message is focused on sacrifice as well, with emphasis on the idea of community and hard work. I have long spent time separating myself from those around me since at one time, those around me separated themselves from me. Again, his message hits a nerve... as I have slowly begun to understand what a true community of friends I have and can have, and what a difference my "new-found" social skills have made. Acting out of Love towards everyone I meet is something I never really consciously decided to do, but I found myself doing it and started noticing it. A warm greeting and the intention of empathy in my heart makes such a difference... it's simply astounding.

So for me, every time our new president has gotten up on his podium to tell the American people that "Yes, We Can," my heart wrenches in the best way possible. I think I cry for the lost time, for the pain we all had to inflict on ourselves before we could come to this understanding and the pain that will continue to afflict us. I cry for the people who cannot fully understand the power of this kind of philosophy, including my own self-consciously simplistic understanding. I cry for the fear that the hope will fade and that the fear-mongering of the last few years will drop a pall over this light. I cry because I feel such immense joy that this world can change if we only let the power of the human spirit burst free of the chains of pessimism. I cry because I am intimately and personally wrapped around the philosophies that I am hearing our country embrace. I cry because I know that tomorrow the practical aspects of daily life will come creeping in on the celebration, and that we will all be tested as to whether we can actually live up to these ideals.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an idealist who never saw his full dream realized. The dreams of today will undoubtedly be similarly long-lasting and long-languishing before they can be fully realized. I smile because I know that there are others in the world that share the burden of hope that one day they will be realized. One day, we will evolve.