Being Young and Doing the Right Thing

How troubling it is to look at my youth and question whether I am using it to its fullest advantage.  People often pacify my frustrations by telling me that I’m yet a young pup, and therefore needn’t expect too much of myself right now.  Just be twenty-two – it’s okay.   

But I ask, if I am not performing to my utmost potential right now, when will I start to?  I find out time after time that the writers I admire most made their splash when they were in their twenties, and so many were dead in their forties.  Perhaps mediocre people are fine being mediocre in their twenties, because so shall they remain for the rest of their lives.  But then again who is mediocre?  I have yet to meet anyone.  And thus my point is moot.

I badly want to be someone who produces.  I want to be creative.  Prolific.  I want to know what I think.  I often question the relationship between my thoughts and my emotions.  When am I thinking and when am I feeling?  There is something that I cannot entirely support that thinks emotions are vastly inferior.  I don’t know why I think that, but I do.  I never want to be someone who acts on emotions and unfailingly “follows my heart,” but I don’t know why I want that.  I want to be a devotee of logic and mindfulness.

Kierkegaard says that faith is absurd and uncanny, and that its binary couple is doubt, associated with the rational side.

Some ethicists say that ethics are morals born of rational thought instead of emotions, which do more to point TO faith in God than away from it (as Kierkegaard would argue).  But what is rational about ethics?  I think this argument depends on where you want to place ethics – I agree that ethics do point to God, but I also think that they are absurd, so I would put them in the same camp with faith (and then they cannot be disconnected from emotions).  Our rational side does not point us to love and sacrifice and to do the right thing, the “ethical” thing.  The rational is not the ethical.  At least mine isn’t.  I think the soul trained to act in love and self-sacrifice defines “rational” completely differently than the soul who thinks being rational means trying to survive.  How do you define that?

I think this explains why I go crazy when I look at the course catalogue at the beginning of every semester.  There are countless course titles that jump out at me because I know they would change my life.  And because I am not able to take them, I am turning away from that change that might happen, for the knowledge, for that which would make me that much more of a mindful, thoughtful, careful person.  There is goodness and rightness in the lectures those professors would give, in the papers I would write for those classes.  And it kills me that I have to turn away from them because my schedule is too full. 

That’s why I think I could get bachelor’s degrees forever.  I want to learn a broad spectrum of everything.  But then, also, I am only scratching the surface of the truths I’d learn.  And I might not even remember them.  My memory is my worst enemy – I encounter something beautiful and good and then it leaves me.  And I see something horrible and evil, and I forget that, too, which is often even more detrimental.