Why?

Why? Why? Why?

It’s the eternal question. We probably ask why every day in some form or another. But me? I’m on the verge of screaming in frustration. I’m sitting here, wondering about life after college. I’m wondering about the grace of God and how above all the crap and “necessities” we put up in life, we should be glorifying His name and spreading the good news to the four corners of the earth. I’m sitting here wondering, why we’re stuck in college, spending money that could go to other things in life, like helping someone who doesn’t have enough money to feed themselves for another day. I’m sitting here wondering why we spend the prime of our lives sitting classrooms, stressing over exams and numbers and stupid things like that. I’m sitting here wondering why we have to stress over everything. I’m sitting here wondering, why? Why? Why?

Innate curiosity is what leads to the question of why. We want to know. We want to understand. We’re human, and we’re flawed. We want to understand, because we like logic, we like order, we like when things make sense.

But this? This doesn’t make sense. And we just go with it like it’s okay. And I’m on the edge, ready to start screaming that I want people to realize that it’s not okay. We go with the status quo, we stick to what we’ve been told. We don’t color outside the lines anymore. Everyone thinks that if we do, chaos will fall down on us and we won’t know how to survive the fall of the debris.

Life was never meant to be complicated. Life was never meant to be painful or fearful. Life was meant to be filled with laughter, joy, grace and purity. Instead we’ve turned it into something that signifies death: we work ourselves in school to get ahead of everyone else. We get to college and we do it all over again, to be the best, to look “the part” of the perfect person, the perfect marriage, the perfect man, the perfect woman. We marry “the part”, we discard it because it wasn’t what we thought. We marry another “the part”, and it still isn’t what we need. We run amuck, we cheat, we steal, we lie, we take no responsibility for our actions, we destroy, we deceive, we ultimately obliterate ourselves and all those around us. We, humans, have become a cancer. And we’re okay with that?

I’m not.

Sayings of hope and peace have become cliché, and no one wants to hear them anymore. Sayings like, “be the change you want to see in the world”, is now something everyone rolls their eyes at, it has no meaning anymore. Words like, ‘love’, ‘forever’, and ‘joy’ are overused. Their meanings are now meaningless. Their light is now faded, useless in the darkness, because no one uses them in the proper context anymore.

Women starve themselves because an image tells them to. Men put on the tough guy act because if they show one shred of emotion, they’re suddenly not men anymore. Children are being raised by nannies, baby sitters, and grandparents, because parents just don’t give enough time for their kids. People become so stressed and depressed because no one listens anymore to one another, we’re all so wrapped up in ourselves that we’re not looking at the people around us.

I want to strip the world of those blinders. I want to scream at them, “Don’t you see? Don’t you see what we’re doing to ourselves?” but no one listens. The voices of those outraged by our indignity and inhumanity are lost in the wind, because we all have to be individuals, just so long as your individuality doesn’t offend anyone.

We point the finger at another and curse them out, telling them they’re wrong, they’re inconsiderate, they’re not being politically correct. But if someone points the finger at us, oh no, we can’t have that. I’m always right, you’re the one that’s always wrong. I win, you lose. I live, you die. It doesn’t matter, so long as I’m the one that ends up on top. And yet we tell our kids name calling is bad, it’s rude, you shouldn’t do it. Then what are we, if not hypocrites?

We’ve twisted the rules, we’ve flipped the game board to match our needs, and not the needs of those around us, we’ve moved the deck of cards closer to us so we don’t have to reach as far, but the person across from us has to get up to draw their next card. We cut in line, saying we’re more entitled than those that have been waiting for hours. We’ve become completely self absorbed. We admonish people for being self centered, selfish and all around self consumed, yet we turn around and do the same thing.

It all comes down to one thing: we’re broken.

We’re broken, and there’s only one thing that can fix it. The only problem that remains is the fact that no one believes in that one thing that can fix us. Why is that?

What have we done? Can we redeem ourselves? Do we want to be redeemed?

Final Paper Anxiety/Frustration

I am going to take a quick moment to talk about the conundrum of homework and tests and finals that every college student in the history of the world is exceedingly well acquainted with. Mostly due to the fact that this semester is the first time in a long time that I’ve been so stressed about projects, papers, and term finals that I’ve become ill to the point of wanting to commit to unconsciousness at 7 in the evening.

For those of you that know me, that’s a problem. For those of you that don’t, I’m naturally nocturnal, and my body doesn’t normally feel the wear of a day until around 2 or 3 in the morning. If I’m saying I want to go to bed at 7 at night, then I’m either sick, or about to become sick. And it appears as though my workload has done just that.

This is the frustration, my biggest beef, with school. Out of all the other little bumps and hiccups that present themselves along the years, this one still remains. All students have been there. You’re sitting in class, and it’s the last two weeks or so of school. Your professor is standing at the front of the classroom, and you already know that you’ve got a paper or project due for the class in a week, and you’re hoping it will be adequate enough to help you pass the class. It’s nearing the end of class, or maybe it’s at the beginning, but the professor sits down or leans on a desk or something and says, “I know that it’s a busy time of year for you guys and you’ve got a lot on your plates,” and then you groan because you know there’s going to be at least a but, and at most an addition to your plate, normally in the form of another quick presentation you’ve gotta do or a quick exam you need to take before you even enter finals week.

So, this is my question; if you see the pattern, if you actually see it and acknowledge that your students are getting burnt out and not sleeping and are forgetting to eat, what compels them to add things to your list of things to do? Is that not the definition of insanity; to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result?

Then you enter finals week, or hell week, depending on who you ask. And we kill ourselves so we can have a number to follow us and hold us where we will in the class line up and in the waiting line for scholarships. No offence, but no number is worth my sanity or my health.

If it weren’t completely impossible to do anything beyond flipping burgers, (it’s a cliché), I would not be going through this torment that people call college. I would be perfectly content with a high school diploma.

Call me lazy. Call me a procrastinator. I’ll be honest and tell you that’s true. But on the other side of the coin is the fact that we’ve allowed ourselves to call insanity smart thinking. We’ve allowed ourselves to take the strongest points of our bodies lives and spend them sitting classrooms, becoming stressed about grades and classes, and not being properly caring of our bodies because we just plain don’t have time.

When did this happen? Why do we accept this? This absurdity needs to change; because eventually, we won’t know how to enjoy life, because we’ll be too busy trying to figure out how to get a better score than so and so on something, or make more money than what’s her face. Humans were not meant for what we spend our time doing. We were meant for interaction, for love, for devotion, for friendship. Yet we sit in rooms, by ourselves, typing away on computers trying to write a ten page paper on something that could be explained in two!

But for some reason we need to explain something to the umpteenth degree to ensure that not only do we know how to find other people who share our views, but we can reiterate it twenty times to meet a set number of sources that agree with us.

This is absurd.