On taking life seriously.

I think that I do take life seriously.

It may not seem so, though, because I am always trying to make life simpler. I like to make decisions simpler, breaking things down into simpler elements so that no one has to be paralyzed by uncertainty.

There's nothing like the sort of talk I had Sunday to make me doubt myself. It was the "what are your intentions for my daughter" talk. I am becoming more aware that I have grown used to people just trusting me and thinking I'm pretty swell automatically...now, when someone doesn't do so my confidence is easily shattered. I don't like that about me. I am not sure if it's a new life trait or anything but I know it's not good.

Still, I know that I was honest and even if I didn't have nice things to say about myself at times, I had good things to say too and in the end I hope what I seemed to be in the end is someone who takes life seriously but doesn't over-complicate it. I want to be both idealistic and practical, and I don't think those things necessarily need to conflict.

I know that I'm not as good as I should be. I fail at a lot of things and I am lazy. But I am honest and I take into account more things into my decisions than maybe I am given credit for, and I am good at keeping in mind what is really important. As long as I continue to grow and take life seriously, I think I will be OK.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for intentionally growing.

Aragorn and Boromir.

It is no mystery to my friends that I am a huge fan of the character Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings.

Aragorn, the strong, enigmatic leader of men, the adventurer, the destined King of Middle-earth. The one of whom Tolkien wrote that at his death, "a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him with wonder; for they saw the grace of his youth, and the valor of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were all blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world."

But alas, I am not like Aragorn, as much as I would like to be. I am a little more like Boromir.

Boromir...proud and willful, valiant but reckless, blunt and impulsive. Alike in stature to Aragorn, but of less grace and majesty. He is jealous of Aragorn and knows he is better. His best quality is that he is remorseful after he tries to take the ring from Frodo, and valiantly gives his life to protect the other hobbits.

In my own life, I fall very far short of the person I would like to be. Like Boromir, I want to be Aragorn but I am still only Boromir, struggling with the smaller things in life.

I think it's important to have appropriate standards in life. Boromir will never be Aragorn and neither will I. I may never get all the things I want from life, even the really good things, just as Boromir will never be king. The best I can do is make up for my mistakes and move on.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream to be a better Boromir.

That THING.

So there was once this THING that I didn't understand before.

This odd depression I noticed people about four years older than me getting. You know, they'd be leaving college. I, a freshman, never understood why they all looked so mopey. They just graduated...they're movin' on. Gettin' a career. What's wrong with that? They should be happy. And it was always only the single ones. Why the single ones?

Now I get it. That thing. It happens when everyone your age is getting married or engaged. It looks like this:

These posts always make me a little self-conscious. I like to pretend I don't care but I do. I know that people will always be quick to jump to conclusions about someone making a post about being single. I do it myself sometimes. Well, here's to posting about what I want to post about anyway. I can't stop you.

Anyway, I know I won't be forever alone and I'm not lonely. That's not the point. The point is, I'm saying something about people. About life - in all its stages. And I'm at that stage where I see everyone around me getting engaged and getting married. And it's hard to be happy for them. It really is.

It'd be a little different if I were in a relationship myself. It truly feels like I did something wrong - because I was with someone for a while, and for the most part I loved it, and almost everyone I know who was in a relationship at that time is now engaged to their significant other. It didn't end that way for me. I dealt the final blow myself.

But when I go to an awesome wedding for two people whom I both look up to so much...and all I can do is clap along with everyone else and pretend I'm not jealous...man, it just sucks. It just does. At a wedding, everyone loves you, sings your praises, eats, dances, and has a blast with you...your best friend at your side, with whom by the end of the night you will be having more than just a little fun. Heck yeah, I want that. At least I'm honest. I don't play along with a pretend utopia where I pretend I don't want what I want. Sometimes that's all I got really going for me - the balls to be honest and say it like I see it.

Balls - there's a word I seem to be using a lot today. That's what it's taken for me to put myself out there. Over. And over. And over again. None of that guarantees someone success. They can do everything right - I can do everything right. And nothing is guaranteed to come of it.

But I gain nothing from just not trying. And I try. I do. And I listen when people tell me to basically not worry about it. To pray. And I do, and and I try. But that's not how this thing works. What I want is something really good - and you can't take the desire for good from me.

My only temptation is to take the easy way out sometimes - and believe me, it's there. Always. But what I keep holding on to is this idea that I must always, always do the right thing. No matter how hard it is. Oh, and I know I fail sometimes, but that is what I always strive for in the end. I want to do what is easy so bad just to feel like my life is going somewhere I want it to for a while.

All I can do is just keep trying as hard as I can to do everything right. Be myself. Keep praying. Trust. Move on. And I do. But it just doesn't get easier.

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for ever together.

The pay-off.

In human action and interaction, there is rarely, if ever, any sort of arbitrariness. There is always a "point" to it...something I am trying to "get" or "achieve."

It is a dangerous business to always go through life without examining what kind of pay-off I am trying to get from my actions. "What is the point of what I'm doing?" I must ask if I truly wish to be a person of virtue.

I have become aware, recently, of how lax I have been in checking myself for these pay-offs. I thank God that I know I'm being an arrogant fool sometimes. It comes out in a few of these posts. While it may be true I feel like a Jedi when I counsel people, I think it is true I tell people so not for any reason other than because I want their approval, which is a very silly reason. If I am to be someone who only cares how God judges me, that's not really the way to go about it.

Even while I am being more vigilant in my awareness of why I am doing what I'm doing I know that I must have blind spots. This is why I have decided I need to make sure I am getting plenty of virtuous friendships. The path to righteousness was never intended, I believe, to be taken alone. This is why I am very grateful for the friendship of a man I will refer to as G.

G and I only met this year, and I must say at first I was a bit annoyed at him. Not because I didn't appreciate his sense of humor and found him a bore, but because I was so unused to not having to work to make friends with someone that I found it almost irritating. But I am grateful I decided to throw this aside and give it a shot. G is a great Catholic man, and even though he seems awkward and timid to the unobservant, in reality he is definitely not afraid to ask me the tough questions. "Do you think you're reading too much into it?" He asked the other day as I told him a guy-to-guy story. I thought briefly and answered "yes" because of course I was.

I appreciated this probably more than I let on to G, because I need friends like him to alert me to my blind spots. Someone to sharpen my iron, to use the Pauline phrase. I know I can count on G to help me grow in virtue, because I can tell that even more than he likes to have fun with me, I know he wants to grow closer to Christ, and help me in that, too.

G is, of course, not the only virtuous friendship I have. I could mention a few others, some of whom are probably my readers (I believe there are about 8 people who regularly keep up with this blog in any regular fashion, and I have perhaps indulgently assumed these are my closest associates). However, G is a great example of what I hope to have more of. I find I am increasingly less interested in idle amusement in my friendships, and more and more interested in learning something from them. This is what attracts me most to a person: their wisdom that I so desperately need!

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for a virtuous pay-off.

On changing my mind.

Reflect on this: if you were perfect, you would never change your mind.

Past posts have been getting a lot of views these past few weeks, and because of the subject matter, I believe I know why.

I've expressed strong opinions about the stages of my life, but yet as I go on I find that although many of my ideas remain the same, some of them I change. I do this because I grow. I'm imperfect.

A year ago, I would have told you that I am often ruled by my emotions. These days, though, I find I've relaxed in that matter. I am in touch with my emotions...I feel them, I experience them, I know them intimately. But instead of acting on them, or letting them affect me, I can choose to let them flow through me. I've mellowed out.

In the same way, I look back on the things I've said about "where I am" and "what I'm doing" and think less seriously of my opinions at those times than I once did. I've learned since then. I am not quite so sure of myself.

Knowledge is how much you know. Wisdom, I believe, is knowing what you don't know. And I've gotten a little more wise.

I find now that I recognize more and more how little I really know and can know. Case in point: my last post about crushes. A year ago I would have never written such a post. I took crushes far too seriously to write such a thing. Now I know them for what they really are: the body's way of pointing out to you interesting women (and also, for those like me who are interested in being single for a while, at least, a damned nuisance).

People who never make assumptions and ask lots of questions are, in my opinion, the wisest people you will ever meet. If you ever make friends with such a person, don't ever take them for granted. I find they are rarer and rarer in our world these days. I hope to be one someday, and I think I'm headed in that direction.

Now, to take my own advice...

There was a dream that I dreamed, a dream for a wiser world.

A fairy tale life.

I think there are some things you can regret for the rest of your life.

One of those things I think I narrowly avoided recently: the loss of a friend who changed my life forever. In talks with my girlfriend I realized that I was really sorry that I let a few petty misunderstandings get in the way of a good friendship. Sometimes I feel that I have a lot of regrets in life and sometimes none at all, but without a doubt I know what happened between this person and I was regrettable. After all this time this person ended up being right about a lot of things. Not everything, but the biggest things, and she never failed to tell me.

My girlfriend and I talk a lot about the skeletons in our closets, our "past lives" so to speak, and how much we've both changed over the years. I've told her many things that I regret, and a lot of things that happened that were bad but I don't necessarily regret. I realized during one of these conversations that I still missed my friend. I thought that when I made sure she was no longer in my life anymore that eventually I would get over it and have no regrets because we were both better off. But I thought about how I would feel years from now, when I don't even see her anymore...how I would wonder how she ended up, and if she still thought about me. I realized that if she and I were not friends again, I would regret it forever, because whether or not she realized it or intended it, she changed my life. The small kindnesses she showed me a year ago are part of the reason why my girlfriend and I are together now. I know I want my friend to be happy and successful, and to do what I can as a friend to help her there.

I said to myself a long time ago, when I was starting to figure myself out, that I wanted a life that I could look back upon and have no doubt that I made it the best life I possibly could. It is a testament to this promise that I look to the future like I have in trying to repair this friendship.

I recently read something I wrote a few months back. It said that all of our lives are fairy tales, and we all deserve a fairy tale ending. Even with the ecstasy of heaven in store, is it still wrong for me to desire a happy ending to the (hopefully) long tale of my life?  In the end, I want to be able to smile knowing that everything really did turn out for the best, and not one loose thread remained for me to tie off.

If there's anything I can ever do to achieve this goal, I know I am sure to do it. I will never give up.

There was a dream that I dreamed, and that dream was for a fairy tale ending.