Category: Personal Update

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Personal Update

Saying Yes

You can’t try everything before you die, but you might as well die trying.

A couple months ago, I read a lovely little biography/devotional book by Mike Donehey, one of my favorite Christian musicians. One of the suggestions he gave was to just be willing to say yes to everything that comes your way. I think the tie-in to Christian living was about allowing God to use you in the way He needs to, and He can’t do that if you’re not willing to take the opportunities He gives you. I’m a firm believer that, as Paul wrote, “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). So I decided to give it a shot.

“Do you want to try rolling the sushi?” Why yes—not that I’ve ever rolled a sushi roll in my life before, and it will most certainly not be the most beautifully rolled sushi that has ever existed, but there’s a first time for everything. Should we go to the opera? Sure, let’s send it; I could use a good opera education. Road trip? Absolutely. Give blood? I wonder how that feels. Part-time research job? Sounds like a good idea. Go country dancing? I can at least pretend that I’m coordinated. Listen to jazz for a week? Prepare to get clobbered by tritone substitutions. Discussion group for a new history book? I loved that stuff in high school. Orchestra and local music concerts? Add to cart. Join the mariachi band? I can’t have stage anxiety forever.

I’m not writing this to make myself sound awesome, but because there’s nothing I can recommend more highly to someone trying to make sense of life in the liminal spaces. I can see the difference that trying to say no to fear has made in my life. I notice so much more of the world’s beauty, and that’s why I write this little blog. I don’t think I’ll ever be done. What will happen when I give painting a shot? Frisbee golf? Karaoke? Reading random cases from the law library? Mock swordfighting? Coding in Python?

Of course it’s impossible to say yes to everything—saying yes to an economics book was a hefty reminder that opportunity cost brings everything to a screeching halt—and there are certainly things that one shouldn’t say yes to. But I’ll be the first one to attest that life is so much richer since, when confronted with the unfamiliar, I’ve started making “yes” rather than “no” the first response on my lips. ∎

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Personal Update

Not What You Do, But Who You Are

Socrates once said (in Plato’s Phaedrus) that there are two kinds of people: 

“…if their compositions are based on knowledge of the truth, and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the test, by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in comparison of them, then they are...worthy of a higher name, befitting the serious pursuit of their life… Wise, I may not call them; for that is a great name which belongs to God alone; lovers of wisdom or philosophers is their modest and befitting title… And he who cannot rise above his own compilations and compositions, which he has been long patching, and piecing, adding some and taking away some, may be justly called poet or speech-maker or law-maker.”

In other words, to the true lover of wisdom, it’s more important to understand what is true than to produce great things–because only in that understanding can one produce the greatest things.

During the last couple months, I haven’t been especially productive at “piecing together my compositions”–I haven’t produced anything particularly beautiful or noteworthy. But I have been learning, living, exploring, and experiencing as much as possible, and if Socrates is right, then the good character that I’m trying to get is much more valuable than any physical thing I ever compose. After all, very few people are ever remembered for making great literature, music, or art. What people are remembered for is being a good parent, or spouse, or teacher, or friend.

Tl;dr: I’ll always be working on some composition or another. But it’s the person you become, not what you leave behind, that really means something. ∎

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Personal Update

I Have Corona

Life update: I have COVID-19.

I found out last Thursday, after I started getting the typical symptoms: headache, sore throat. I had a sneaking suspicion that it might have been a breakthrough infection, so I got tested at the university, and it came back positive.

After two phases of lockdown in Denmark over the course of a year, and after having been vaccinated, I had all but banished the possibility of another lockdown or quarantine from my mind. Such did not prove to be the case. Over the past couple days, I’ve been attending classes and working from here while still waiting to see the outside world. I suppose it borders on cliché to comment on how miraculous that is–twenty years ago, I’d be doing nothing but watching VHS tapes on a low-definition TV.

To celebrate the occasion, I thought I’d share a bit from an 1353 work of Italian literature, The Decameron, which is about ten young adults who run away from the city during the Black Death and tell stories to one another to pass the time. Plague seems to be the topic of the zeitgeist, and there’s something fascinating about reading contemporary attitudes about one of history’s deadliest plagues and seeing people newly discover things we take for granted with modern germ theory.

“This pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick, the way a fire close to dry or oily things will set them aflame. And the evil of the plague went even further: not only did talking to or being around the sick bring infection and a common death, but also touching the clothes of the sick or anything touched or used by them seemed to communicate this very disease to the person involved.

“What I am about to say is incredible to hear, and if I and others had not witnessed it with our own eyes, I should not dare believe it (let alone write about it), no matter how trustworthy a person I might have heard it from. Let me say, then, that the plague described here was of such virulence in spreading from one person to another that not only did it pass from one man to the next, but, what’s more, it was often transmitted from the garments of a sick or dead man to animals that not only became contaminated by the disease but also died within a brief period of time.  My own eyes, as I said earlier, were witness to such a thing one day: when the rags of a poor man who died of this disease were thrown into the public street, two pigs came upon them, and…took the rags and shook them around; and within a short time, after a number of convulsions, both pigs fell dead upon the ill-fated rugs, as if they had been poisoned.”

Even more fascinating are the diverse and extreme reactions to the plague. “…almost all of [those who remained alive] took a very cruel attitude in the matter; that is, they completely avoided the sick and their possessions, and in so doing, each one believed that he was protecting his own good health.” Others “thought that living moderately and avoiding any excess might help a great deal in resisting this disease, and so they gathered in small groups and lived entirely apart from everyone else…eating the most delicate of foods and drinking the finest of wines (doing so always in moderation), allowing no one to speak about or listen to anything said about the sick and the dead outside.” Still others “believed that drinking excessively, enjoying life, going about singing and celebrating, satisfying in every way the appetites as best one could, laughing, and making light of everything that had happened was the best medicine for such a disease…This they were able to do easily, for everyone felt he was doomed to die and, as a result, abandoned his property, so that most of the houses had become common property, and any stranger who came upon them used them as if he were their rightful owner.” In any case “the revered authority of the laws, both divine and human, had fallen and almost completely disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and executors of the laws were either dead or sick or so short of help that it was impossible for them to fulfill their duties; as a result, everybody was free to do as he pleased.”

Makes me a little more grateful that, despite everything that’s happened this year, from infections to rejections to armed insurrections, at least civilization as we know it hasn’t collapsed. ∎

Cover photo: A display at the BYU Museum of Art, which I visited not long before falling ill.