Random Things

I've been thinking a lot lately about life, and the world, and how I had stopped thinking about life and the world for kind of a long time. I used to read book after book about the state of our culture, the meaning of life, and how we should live. I wanted to talk about it at parties and at dinner and in class. But no one else wanted to talk about it. And I found myself totally strung out and feeling like I was going to have to single-handedly save the world. I grew exhausted and so full of anxiety I would sometimes wake up vomiting in the night. Craziness, I know. So, I stopped reading book after book and started trying to relax and enjoy my daily life. And I learned how to do that, and am much happier for it. But now all of a sudden all of my friends want to talk about it. They're talking politics, philosophy, religion, etc. They want to talk about how the world's gone to shit and what we should do about it. And I'm finding myself nervous about joining in again. I think it's because I know that once you start in on the conversation...once you allow yourself to jump in and become aware of what's really going on around you (and decide to talk about it), everything changes. And this is good, but it's a little scary. That's why so many people don't participate in the conversation. Most people don't even recognize that the conversation exists. People don't want to consider that everything that they hold true could merely be an illusion. They don't want to think about the possibility that we could be wrong about everything. People don't want to think at all. But I do want to think, so I've decided I have to jump in the conversation again....as exhausting as it can sometimes be. I'm going to start by writing more. I used to love writing, and I'm good at articulating my perception of the world. So, consider this post the first of many more. I went through some of my old papers from college, and I'm going to leave you with an excerpt from one of my favorites:
Perhaps there is nothing worse than uncertainty, for with uncertainty comes chaos. The first time we discover that something we always held true is not true at all, we must stop and reevaluate who we are and what we believe about everything else. Because, as C.S. Lewis said, we accept everything we know on the authority of someone else, we can sometimes feel as though we don't really know anything at all. And there lies an almost subconscious choice between living an orderly life in ignorance, or a chaotic life in truth.