Sleepless in Provo

I am in Provo.....and I am sick.....and though exhaustion racks my body, my mind is alive and alert from the stress of knowing I have so much to do, and yet another day has passed with me barely touching it as it flees on by.

Summer was a change in my life. I made a true income, I spent like I made a true income, I loved and lost, and then I loved again. My faith was tested, my resolve changed, my empathy grew, my sadness magnified ten times, and my soul ached. I have tasted bitterness and I have not been able to let its taste leave my mind or heart. I have cried and smiled more than ever before...and so much passion led to this..... the faster moments of my life.

I am in law school, and every day is a blur of activity. I learn so much to only realize that the knowledge is fleeting and not staying with me. I have never felt like there wasn't enough time to do what needs to be done, but I do now. I have never felt like I wasn't intelligent, but now I feel humble and as average as any other man. This experience has broken what resolve I had left, and now I am trying to piece back together a dream of what I want in the future?

Do I want to be an attorney? Do I want to live in Montana? Who do I want to be with for the rest of my life? So many questions, and so few answers.....and I need to slow down. Life is meant to be experienced, but the guiding comes from God.....

I need to sleep, and I will try now, for 6 hours, then another full day. I need to write more often, to tell about taking my friend to the MTC, about rodeos, new loves, my schooling, and above all about my testimony of life and God's purpose therein for each of us to fulfill. How wonderful it is to know we are not alone, to know our moments are measured above. How reassuring to have a prophet who gives direct communication to a world who needs a second witness of what God teaches through prayer. I am truly blessed.

Quick catch up notes

For those individuals who read the blog to catch up on my life instead of my simple musings, the following are a few notes of happenings over the past few months. (from the whole 102...yes we have hit triple digits,... viewings, I doubt anyone does this, but considering this blog acts as a sort of journal I should probably highlight some things)

* I graduated college Magna Cum Laude in Economics with 171 credits and a 3.95 GPA

* I accepted an offer to attend law school at the J. Reuben Clark School of Law at BYU

* I had a job for the summer working for the National Park Service, but am now taking an offer to work as a Graduate Technical Intern for Intel in Hillsboro, OR

* I learned it is possible to fall in love within two months

* I lost 15 pounds

* I developed a deeper love for racquetball

* I wrote an economic analysis on collusion in the potato market, and am in the process of having my research published

* I came to a deeper realization of God's hand in my life

Anyone of those topics I could write about...but when I write, it has to come from an emotional spring within. When that spring is bubbling forth, my words come naturally and I am able to express myself...but when the springs is dry..... so too are my words. I am afraid for tonight the spring is dry. But remind me....or rather I will remind myself, that I need to write about agency, faith, love, and the importance of honesty.

picture collage of last semester

Entering the Summer of My Life

I have developed this rather inconvenient habit this semester......I sleep on the couch almost every night. I live with five roommates and I share a room with one of them. My love and appreciation for Parker, my roommate, is not what is in question, rather it is my lack of ability to find peace in my bedroom. From the beginning of the semester, whenever I lay down to go to sleep, my mind goes into overload with stress about life. "Are you caught up on your research thesis, you are still not married, have you finished your graduate school applications, why aren't you sleeping yet, ....etc....etc...etc." It became such a problem that I would stay up past three in the morning so I would become so exhausted I would pass out on the couch.....and the stress didn't follow out of my room onto my "de facto" bed "a la" couch.

Last night I tried out my bed again, and guess what.....YEP I stressed out of my mind till I passed out of exhaustion. When I got up this morning I started analyze what it was that was making me so stressed. Am I so far behind that every night I push myself to an ulcer to make sure I am in place? My musings led me to Great Harvest Bread where I was buying a batch of cinnamon rolls for the economics lab. Smelling the fresh baking bread, and the casual ambience of the store put me into a lull. Is my life so hard? Does it matter how ahead or behind I am? When was the last time you stopped to enjoy life, to live instead of simply existing and achieving....

Listening to "American Honey" , part of my new country kick back I am in right now, it spoke of nothing being sweeter in summertime than American Honey. The corny lyrics made me laugh, but the images of summertime in Montana brought tears to my eyes. I could feel the warm sun, so much closer at 7,000 ft elevation, licking my skin into a deep tan. I could smell the fresh cut hay, hear the rippling of the creeks throughout my ranch, and feel the shade of the pine trees as I hiked up in the mountains. I remembered the cold of Flathead Lake as I would jump into it and swim for hours, only to retreat to a dock and drink cold "Tea de Rey." Tears combined with smiles as I remembered camping this last summer with my family up by Lake Koocanusa, the first camping trip the men in our family have ever taken together. My life is so good,....and it has barely began. It is folly to view ones life in the comparison with past achievements. I am no longer the national champion in speech and the over achieving extracurricular student. Nor am I the party king who wasted his life on fast times and memories, and yet again I am not the super obedient missionary who dedicated my life God. I am simply Gage....and that encompasses all the past and all the future, whatever it may be. I am entering the summer of my life. I will attend law school this fall, and I have no idea which law school it will be, and later I will have a job and start my career. But the simple mechanics of living are less important than the moments we spend in life with others and the memories, memories like those that brought me so much joy today.

We focus so much as the accomplishment of a task we forget the joy the journey. In our need to be efficient, in a society that values what you can produce more than what have contributed, we are continually incentivized to forget the moments in the middle, and instead push through for the end result only to be once again thrown into another task. When was the last time we made goals for ourselves, and lived the moments in between those goals. When do we live our lives, and perform our jobs not at the ends themselves, but merely an means to an end, the end being achieving the ability to have free time to love life and share it with those we love. I was struck by a close friend recently who was listening to me talk about my abuelita and Nicaragua. She asked me if I had ever visited, and I let her know that I had not....and right there she made me promise to set a date to visit my family's ancestral home. The date is set, the summer when I graduate law school I will leave for Nicaragua and give myself the opportunity to see where the essence of who I am came from.

Let us enjoy all the seasons of our life. I have past the spring and am in the bloom of life, the summer where I will shine as brightly as I can, and I will enjoy the loves of life, and will burn in the heat of passion, the sun of our lives. I will work tirelessly, but not for the right to say I am successful, but rather to experience the joys this world has to offer. And as my life enters the twilight of Fall, and fades into the winter of my life as I await rebirth into another life, a better world, I will remember the lessons of summer, that life is meant to be lived in all seasons...and not merely endured.

Here's to sleeping in my bed again!

Reality and Anger

I have been fascinated with the concept of non-linear time since I was first made aware of it. I remember leaving my Psych 370 class, Personality Theory, and walking into the hall like it was the first moment of my life and possibilities were endless. I have forever been enticed to live my life in a way to reflect non-linear ideas though being constrained by a linear society.

Those feelings of freedom and enlightenment occurred again today as I went to a class on a part of Mormon scripture called "The Pearl of Great Price." We discussed what is reality? Well in the reality of our lives it is what is tangible or can affect permanently our lives or the lives of others. But in the context of eternity we never experience reality, at least not now. Reality is the mind of God, the context of where he dwells and his state of being. It is without beginning of days or end of years, it is eternal. Reality has no place in this life of ours. Here we can break away from the reality of eternal life, escape or rather postpone the consequences of actions as we make choices. God cannot exist here, nor can he stay in a permanent state here, and for us to be able to endure his presence we are transformed to a point where we are in reality and can experience him. He seeks to teach us, to enlighten our understanding and show us what is real, but we must choose to accept it in the context of this "fake" world of temporal decisions and effects. He teaches in the temple, and thus in the context of being between heaven and earth, in his figurative if not literal presence we can experience the ideas of the eternities. Just like non-linear time, this speaks to my soul. We seek for so much more than this life.

I remember being a little boy, well about 15, and aching for this world. I hated the injustice, the last of love and concern that was evidenced. I made dumb decisions one day when I grew despondent of life. After playing with my own existence, and a momentary lapse where I literally ran through the willows about a mile from my house with nothing on but my guilt and own anguish, I came home and slept. I remember feeling like we, humanity was meant for so much more than this paltry life. I think we have all had those moments where we recognize that we are not living a real life, but it is so beneath us, and yet so hard for us to comprehend. We are eternal beings, our souls feign to understand temporal when we have only ever known eternal. We have lived for eons as non-linear beings, ideas and concepts, and now we are forced to follow a linear world and the constraining upon us is the best evidence for which we can FEEL that this is not real. I feel so unlimited when I recognize that there is more. The commandments of God are not walls to control us, rather they are instructions into symbolic levels of what is real.

My second, rather random thought is that of anger. I have held rancor in my heart towards someone who, though they recognized I was unhappy and continued to seek to push me, seemed to only be doing that which he has done time and again. Individuals, though infinite with possibility and chance, are so much like the helix where they are bound to repeat their own decisions and choices again but at a different moment in their life. This individual does not understand his own actions, and merely plays his part. When we recognize our ability to change that part then we are held accountable for its consequences but until then we are like children merely acting out. I have such remorse for holding him in such low regard and now seek rather to love him and forget. Anger gives us nothing back in return but rather drains us until we are forced to feed upon ourselves. Forgiveness and love are an never ending well that will spring up more of their own feelings and therefore sustain us.

Here is to love, forgiveness, and the concept that we live outside reality......today has been a good day.

Help others to help yourself

I should be studying, but I am blogging. My priorities are jumbled, and frankly, I am not worried about it at the moment. Feelings impress their the desire to be shared and so I am acquiescing, like usual, to their demands.

Actually, I just got off a two hour phone conversation with a dear friend, and my mindset has changed, and so my topic is changing. I am listening to dance music and the upbeat tempo aides in the urgency to write my message before I sleep and get up in 5 hours to work out.

I feel so often like I have no control in my life. Obviously, there are many individuals who experience this feeling as well. Yet, I think we often overlook the number one way we deal with lack of control in our lives. We feel more in control of ourselves as we give advice to others and think that somehow by giving them the advice that often we are to take ourselves, that we are somehow aiding ourselves.

Do we really help that much when we listen, advise, listen, console, and then advise some more. I am a firm believer that we are in fact helping.

What is help? I am no miracle worker. I am not expecting anything I say to change someone's life forever. I am not expecting to move mountains or change the course of history, let alone one life with some motivational speech I ever give. I am however hoping to make a small disturbance, a ripple, a pebble thrown in the midst of a mighty river. That ripple in actuality does little nothing to the course of the river. However, the accumulation of pebbles in a river, thousands or even millions, acts like a dam and changes the course. In fact, the slow changes move a river more than a large dam will. Lifestyle changes that are immediate are like forcing a river to dam. The river stops its course, but has a tendency to overrun its edges and spreads in many directions, in fact it is directionless, other than moving down with gravity towards the path or least resistance. When we force people to change immediately, we will many times get the same chaotic effect. The small amount of pebbles that change a course in a small manner, allow the river time to cut away at the bank, and over years, thousands, it carves a new path, one of its own, and thus the accumulation of millions of pebbles brings about the desired result with a direction consistent with the purpose throughout.

When I talk to someone I just want to be the small pebble that through a gradual effect will change their life. In fact, if I don't change someone's life in a small way every day of my life I have wasted another day. I think our life is meant to be about gradual changes. Albeit there exists time when we need to make drastic changes, it is usually the slow change that is demanded by society and/or religion. If we all aiding each other in those changes through small acts of kindness of words of advise we would accomplish the task quicker. Thus a zion like people, one that cares as much for the others as for themselves, will usually accomplish more quicker.

This reminds me of the principles of Adam Smith. Those who hate capitalism, and its first proponent, Adam Smith, do not understand him. His principle of self interest, not greed, but self interest cannot be truly understand merely from reading "The Wealth of Nations" but only from a study of it as well as "Theory of Moral Sentiments." A people without morality acting selfishly with greed will never be able to progress far with capitalism. Rather with rule of law and a moral people, democracy and capitalism can exist and expand a community and country. In our lives we cannot progress or at least not at the rate that is possible without communal help. This help cannot be achieved without the ability to trust and rely on others, and that trust and reliance is built off of rule of law and a belief in the morality of the people. As a people are moral, the reliance increases and thus social contracts enforced by rule of law are more likely to occur, and thus society progresses at a greater rate.

Ultimately the principle I have beat around this entire is that it is more important to help others than yourself. By acting in our self interest often we will help others, and then the side effects give us a greater benefit than if we tried to help ourselves. When we give advise, or take it, we need to understand nothing changes overnight but if we are bettered for a moment, the ripples of the river, then we have made an impact. Then as those moments accumulate over a lifetime we are able to change the course of any life and thereby the world.