I’m constantly amazed at the sheer amount of people I’m encountering during my college experience that just DON’T CARE. What is it about people that make them this way? Am I just abnormal or are they the deviants? Whatever it is, these people that sully my existence are merely in college for a future goal. They just live—paycheck to paycheck and always hoping for the better deal. Theirs is a world of bottom lines and rising percentages. A lot of them come into college and sign up to be business majors, thinking that all they have to do is be a brownnoser to the big boss and someday they’ll be fat and happy at the head of a boardroom. A fine goal, I suppose, but what truly stupefies me is that that existence is ALL they want in life.
Don’t people understand that there’s so much more to this world? I’m at college for my goals, sure. I’m here to get a degree so that I can get a job that pays enough for me to live on and to be able to say, yes, I have a degree. Vanity. But there’s another part of me, the part that’s here because I honestly like learning, and a part that realizes that this world isn’t finite. Earth isn’t governed by bottom lines and rising percentages. There’s something more, and people just aren’t seeing it. Our species’ very name, Homo sapiens, means “man the thinker.” We’re supposed to be wrestling with our world, thinking about it, not just merely existing. Functioning. We are not “man the automaton.” Dr. Callis has been talking about natural beauty in our Victorian Literature class. Natural beauty is the kind that is so pure, so inherently beautiful, that it points towards a higher power, towards God's existance. Isn’t that what we, as homo sapiens, should be looking for, if not exemplifying? That’s why I want to be a writer. I believe I was given the ability to see a side of life, the imagination, which most people have left behind in their childhoods. I will be pointing towards an element of a higher beauty--at least that’s what I’ll be attempting to do. I'm not so conceited to believe that I'll actually be able to do this.
Therein lays my point. How many people walk right past natural beauty, and don’t even see it? How can you ignore something that should be so tightly interwoven into your nature that you physically cannot undervalue it? But so many people do! They’re so busy watching the game that They. Are. Missing. It! It infuriates me. How can you live like that? The only things that make this life worth it to me are the universals, those ascetics that make this world, despite its suffering, so beautiful.
Too bad people are so busy keeping their noses buried in Playboy that they can’t appreciate Dickens or a flower beside the road.
5 years ago
5 comments:
*blinks* nope I'm not gonna take the shot... to easy.
But I honestly can't agree with you more. People choose not to think about things, that would require them to evaluate their lives and they may not like what they found.
I'm with you, Katie. I'd rather be soul-deep in the trees of Herb Parson's than in a hot tub. I would rather try to touch my own soul in the hair of a deer than the leather interior of some fancy car.
Yes Katie. We are different. Our sin does not define us, Christ does. Relish in this difference. It is what makes everything so much more beautiful.
Hey Jess! Like Your Picture!
Katie, I have always tried to point you guys to the everyday beauty that is in our world. If you can take pleasure in a beautiful day (like today), the bright moon on a winter's night, the Iris that is a perfect shade of purple, or the rhythm of waves crashing to shore, you can better handle the bad things that life sometimes brings. Keep looking, Katie, God's beauty is all around us.
The problem with America is that in trying to be productive they have become absolutely useless. I say "absolutely" because in an immediate sense, we are not useless; but ultimately, we are. We will not outlive our rate of production; once we stop delivering the goods, we become a liability on the world's radar. Poetry, literature, wrestlings with the infinite, things that can perpetuate a nation, people, and civilization beyond its own finite existence are generally wasted in America. We have no time for them, as they are not immediately useful. Perhaps America will fulfill T.S. Elliot's prophecy of the "Hollow Men": we end, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
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