Life of the Fittest
My time at the University of Utah is very quickly wrapping up. After having started work on a Psychology degree about two years ago, I will walk in May and get my English degree instead. It wasn’t what I had planned on doing, but plans are always changing. And I will always remember that first, decisive semester at the U, when I took my first English class. I have had friends in the past who were English majors, and I always envied them their knowledge about literature although they envied me my scientific and mathematical prowess. Skills I suppose I should be proud of. Skills I’ve never really had to work all that hard for. But skills that have always differentiated me, in one or another, from the others.
About five years ago, I graduated for the first time from the University of Utah, obtaining a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Meteorology, and from that day hence, Meteorology and I have gone our separate ways. I tried, halfheartedly, to pursue a career in Meteorology, keeping in the back of my mind the thought that what was most important for me was that I find a good, stable job that would simply pay the bills and provide for a relatively comfortable lifestyle. But when you try at something halfheartedly, sometimes your efforts will be fruitless, and you will instead find yourself doing something you had never planned on doing. You might even find yourself doing this very something else for three, four, five, five and a half years, the time very quickly adding up against you, reminding you that, for every second that passes, you lose all the job skills you supposedly acquired while you were attending school and that what once used to be an option has slowly but surely turned into a fantasy (whether you desire it or not).
Five and a half years, I’ve been working at the same job, and four and a half years at the other. I lost a lot of time during that time just playing solitaire at work and watching movies. I lost a lot of time just sitting on my ass, staring out the window, trying to figure out what I should do with my life (a question that has never ceased to plague me). At six years though – six and five for the both jobs – I will graduate once more, though my degree may be less practical than the first time around. And though I will not graduate with distinction like I did in high school, I will graduate with accomplishment.
The first time I attended the University of Utah, I went there on a full-tuition scholarship, I had received a $3000 stipend (through another scholarship program), and I had even had all my books paid for by my mom’s office. I had it EASY. But easy is not always a good thing. My grades slipped over the years as I began to think myself capable of just coasting the whole way through, as I began to try other things (insert a variety of bad choices here), as I fretted over relationship after relationship (the “boys = bad” mentality never really worked on me, though I wish I had been less naive in retrospect). And then I lost my scholarships. One. By. One. Until all I had left was simply my determination to complete my degree and get the hell out of there.
Mission accomplished.
But along with that accomplishment came a new commitment, the commitment called marriage. And shortly after that came the commitment of parenthood. Both of which I will never claim to be a bad decision for whatever reason and both of which I can never tell someone there is a right and a wrong time for. They’re simply commitments that you’re either ready for or you’re not and that you’ll, ultimately, stand up to the responsibilities of… or not if you’re someone like my piece-of-shit father which is another story in-and-of itself. Let’s just say this: if you’re someone like me, that is, if you’re someone stubborn beyond all belief, you’ll find a way, whatever the circumstances, to make it work. End of story.
And that is just what we have done. We have found a way, this way or that, to make this life work. But there comes a time, as there must for everyone who desires not just surviving in life but also progressing, when just working is, quite simply, not enough. People will tell you that when they get sick, e.g. when they get diagnosed with cancer, they can feel the sickness within them before the doctor even diagnoses it. And if they’ve been cured, they can tell you too, based solely on their experiences of themselves, that the sickness has passed. This, I feel, compares well to the sickness I experience of just surviving, which seems, at the same time, to contradict the very idea of survival. Survival = life, right? No, no I don’t think so.
Survival does not guarantee life, and therefore, survival does not equal life. In fact, it seems to me that survival is contrary to the very idea of life, at least as I understand it (insert theory of evolution here and its ensuing debate). There is nothing natural, to me, about surviving. And there is nothing about surviving that seems to guarantee progression. Either of the human species as a whole or individually. And which is what I’m most interested in for myself and my family. Say what you want about the evolution of the species. Say what you want about faith even in contradiction to the science of it. I DON’T BUY ANY OF IT. I believe that the human species has evolved and adapted over time, that we have become smarter and more capable of greater and greater things. I believe that adaptation is a necessary skill in this increasingly complex world. But I don’t believe that mere survival is any way of living. For myself or for my family.
My better judgments of myself inform me that I am a perfectly capable individual, that I can accomplish a great many things in my life. My better judgments of myself even, at times, inform me that I can and will persevere against the greater odds against me. I was a birth-control baby with an abusive father and whose grandfather had attempted, at one time, to persuade my mother to give me up for adoption. My mom endured many complications with me while she was pregnant, almost losing me from going into early labor, and almost losing me to the persuasiveness of the difficulties of youth and responsibility. This alone informs me that I will survive. And this, I know, to be a certainty.
But mere survival is not enough for me. And the very idea of it dams up within me, like a sickness cutting off the blood circulation within my body. I feel a tumor of it invade my senses, and I repulse at the thought of it claiming my very life.
At various benchmarks in my life, I have made plans to do this thing or that, always thinking ahead to better times when I can pursue those things of interest to me. I have conjured up dreams of such vivid detail that I begin to think they’re real and that the possibility of attaining them becomes a certainty. But my dreams, at the same time, are constantly undergoing re-envisioning as I encounter obstacle after obstacle that forces me to adapt. And, in this way, the dream very quickly transforms again into the fantasy.
I am tired of the fantasy.
I tell myself as I make various changes in my life that once I accomplish this task, I can move on to the next, that one step forward eases the next. But it seems to me that, over the course of my life, I have lost my footing, and I no longer know which way is up and which way is down, which way is forward and which way is back. One dream takes the place of another, and I do not realize that in order to accomplish each of them, I have to rethink my thinking. Rethink my thinking? It’s like trying to rethink an action so natural as walking or blinking. And how in the hell do you rethink a dream? How do you rethink an unconscious reaction to your life at present?
I hear in my mind at all times the voices of people around me. These people may be real, or they may be fantasy. But they tell me that anything is possible and that I simply must seize the day (Carpe diem!) while I stare at them in blank consternation. Such seeming well-meaning, more often than not, only accomplishes bitter skepticism. If it is so easy to simply go out there and make your dreams happen, I want to ask, why have so many people been unable to accomplish them? A debate ensues within my head. But there are exceptions every day, I hear someone say. Yes, I respond, but do you not see that, ofttimes, their success is at the expense of the whole? The debate goes on and on, eventually coming to a standstill. And I give it up for the time being.
Where is this going, I now ask myself. What are these thoughts that I am having? I write these things now because I have had to rethink some things over over the past couple of days, things that have lain dormant in the back of my head as I’ve made plans for other things. Freud would inform me that my experience of late is an experience of the uncanny, that it is the experience of things repressed finally coming to the surface thus giving me the impression that there is some other supernatural (NOT godly) force at work here. It is odd, yes, the world seeming to force me to make a decision that I was already thinking about making. It is odd, yes, when life seems to say to me everything that I have been saying.
As my time at the U is very quickly coming to an end, options stretch out before me. As my life becomes informed by this thing or that, new doors open in front of me. My dream remains the same, but my path changes. And I seem, once again, to know where I am going. And I can tell you this: I am not going in the direction of just surviving.
