My First Semester: How do you feel?

As headed back to college on Monday, I was excited to go back yet unprepared in many aspects to restart my busy life after the lull of the holidays.  As I return to college, I do not feel completely ready to both learn more things and put in to practice the things that I learned last semester, especially the life lessons that I have outlined in my previous two blog posts.  I think it is important, especially in the life of a young person like me, to continuously look for life lessons.  This normally comes by good and bad experiences.  As R. G. LeTourneau once said when reciting a certain billboard: "I got my good judgment from my experience, and my experience from my bad judgment".   So as I look for lessons in my own life, especially those made fresh by the college experience, this is one principle that has really stuck out to me:

Feelings are not as important as we make out in today's society.

Now let me clarify myself, I am not throwing feelings out the window.  We should not attempt to make others feel bad or find feelings somehow undesirable.  Nevertheless, feelings play a much larger part in our lives than they should.

A few years ago, on the drive back from my weekly piano lessons as a student teacher, I would catch a certain podcast on the radio by Robert Jeffress.  This pastor presented a certain picture of persistence in a particular podcast.  One of his quotes was particularly eye opening for me: "It is much easier to act yourself into a feeling, than to feel yourself into an action."  Now that quote sounds like a mouthful at first, and it took my a while to truly understand it and take it to heart.

In my previous blog post, I talked about hard work and motivation.  When I look at these two concepts in today's world, their biggest enemy is one's feelings.  In a sense, our feelings rule our lives.  All around us, we are bombarded with advertisements and objects that offer us positive feelings.  We are offered positive and beneficial feelings through financial security: the latest electronics, sexual experiences, and the biggest and best possessions.  This attitude that our life should cater to our feelings is in many ways antithetical to hard work and motivation.  As a result of this attitude, when presented with a task of any size or shape, we often fail to go through with it because we do not feel like doing it.  We do not feel like doing our homework, we do not feel like being nice to that guy, we do not feel like spending our time and energy investing in others, we do not feel like working on our relationship with God.  However, if we look to our feelings to govern our actions, we usually end up accomplishing nothing.  And this is where I find the quote previously mentioned so applicable to today's society.  "It is much easier to act yourself into a feeling, than to feel yourself into an action."  The fact is, we often rely on our feelings to motivate us to action.  Yet when this becomes our mode of self-motivation, we seldom get anything accomplished.

Contrast the futility of being felt into action with the power of acting oneself into a feeling.  Start working, and motivation will soon come to work harder.  For those of you that have been on mission trips before, isn't it right after a mission trip when you are most fired up and ready to help people?  Assuredly, it is after the mission trip is done that you feel that you have been lacking in the actions department.  Many a time have I been fired up to help others after a fulfilling Church mission trip.  This illustrates my point perfectly.  Sometimes, when the feelings do not come, you just have to follow Nike's slogan: "just do it".

This whole idea of feelings being insufficient for action has a great correspondence to the greatest quality in our Christian faith: love.  Here is another quote by one of the greatest Christian minds, C. S. Lewis: “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”  As Christians, we are clearly called to love others.  However, our cultures view of feelings often gets in our way.  We often wait for some butterfly feeling in our stomachs before we do something.  However, as Lewis points out, this is not the Christian view of love. The Christian's idea of love is a constant desire for another person's good, something that can never be produced by feelings, thereby proving the futility of feelings as a motivating force.  And now an excursus into some theology, Christians, we understand the futility of feelings and realize that this power to be motivated to good deeds is ours through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Recently, I have been reading through Colossians, and this stuck out to me: "May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy."  (Colossians 1:11 ESV)

So what does this have to do with school?  As I head back on Monday, I am challenged to put these ideas into actions.  They are ideas that I have learned, yet in many ways, they are still ideas.  Putting these things into practice is much more importance.  And now to quote another smart man, Mark Driscoll, "it is not just about information but transformation.". My feelings are always present, and seldom ignored.  I hope to come to a point where I will not be controlled by my feelings, but act myself into a healthy way of life.

My First Semester: Hard Work and Self-Motivation

My next two things that I learned in College are not mutually exclusive, so please forgive me if I overlap several times.

Hard work: Difficult but necessary

I really don't want to talk about this one.  I really do not feel like working to write this section of my blog.....

These are the things we say to ourselves all of the time.  Some things may be worth doing, but we do not want to take the time to work really hard on them.  Yet the reality is, humanity goes nowhere when hard work is absent.  It has been said that "we stand on the shoulders of giants".  This is phrase is largely true.  Our lives are benefited everyday from great minds such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.  However, this phrase could be changed to something like this: "we stand on the shoulders of some giants, yet more importantly on the heads of many stacked ants."  Now, I am no professional at making new quotes (that last one may have hurt some ears in the process), but my point is, while we are benefited from the great work of really smart people, we also have benefits from many hard workers whom we have not heard of before.  Like these said ants, the hard workers before us have little control of how we use the benefits provided by them, but we nevertheless benefit from them.  Hard work, I am realizing, is not only a healthy way to run your own life, but a healthy way to protect and benefit the lives of those who come after you.  It is easy to get caught up in feelings, but the fact is, sometimes you have to "just do it".  I may have a term paper that is due in two weeks, and I may not feel like doing it, but in the end, working hard at it is the only way to solve the problem, unless, of course, you want a really bad grade.  Although motivation may be hard to come by, expecting things to get done without hard work is an unrealisticmindset.  And if you are searching for motivation, take this advice:

Self-Motivation is overrated
So far, I feel that college has been one of the most productive times of my life in many ways.  I am around brilliant professors who have a firm handle on their professional, spiritual, and intellectual lives.  I get to meet people from all over America and from other countries, giving me new perspectives.  Through lots of hard work, I am one eighth of the way towards my college degree.  That is a primary reason why I look back on my first semester of college with satisfaction.

There are a lot of self-help books out there that aim to motivate the public to gain some self-motivation (kinda ironic, huh?).  As I think about college, I was seldom motivated by myself.  I was motivated by teachers, tests, homework, and grades.  For me, motivation seldom comes through myself.  Sure, I may have the occasional off-day where I have a substantial amount of self-motivation, but most of the time, I fully understand what I should be doing yet am unmotivated to do anything.  However, motivation and prodding from others is generally beneficial.   For example, take one of my goals I had for Christmas break: doing some more blogging. However, as I said before, self-motivation is hard to come by.  Solution: write a very rough draft, send it to an English major friend at LeTourneau, and get some other friends excited about your upcoming blogs.

I say that others-motivation is much more beneficial than self-motivation.  There are 2 reasons why I think this: (1) We often have a natural tendency to be lazy and (2) it is easy for us to boss other people around.  Of course, the counter to this is that we do not like to be bossed around, and can get very angry if someone rubs us the wrong way.  When motivating others and being motivated by others, the motivaters need to be careful with their words, and the motivated need to develop a thick skin at times.  If both the motivator and the motivated can do this, the self-help book economy may not be supported, but humanity will get things done more efficiently and effectively.

P.S.  If you haven't noticed yet, I am a little of a productivity freak.

My First Semester of College: Context, Context, Context

I have finally finished my first semester of college, and have not been on the blogosphere for quite some time, so I knew it was necessary to start up again over Christmas break.  Since my first semester of college was a really great learning experience, I am going to share a few thoughts over the span of a couple blog posts.

Context, context, context

Language, literature, learning, and life happens in a certain context (yes an engineering major just made an alliteration).  This may be the biggest reason why understanding and relating to others is so difficult.  This has a definite application to literature which I experienced this past semester.  In my Classical Western Literature class (a.k.a. Comp 1) we read books written by people such as Homer, Virgil, and Aeschylus.  In many ways, these books were confusing to me, but they started to make more sense after my professor explained the ways in which the author's context dictated his writing, and how the author's writing influenced his context and culture.  Similarly, when trying to get a grasp on the Bible, knowing the context helps immensely in understanding the meaning present in the Bible.  Context both unites people with common time periods and/or locations yet at the same time separates people with contrasting time periods and/or locations.

I notice this effect of uniting and dividing most notably in the area of sarcasm.  Sarcasm is quite possibly the best way to measure how well you know someone.  Just about everyone has been in a situation where sarcasm is used, but instead of providing everyone with a laugh, it leads to confusion and/or pits people against each other.  Think of this example: your good friend makes an allusion to a previous joke or situation, and while you totally understand the reference, no one else has a clue what he/she is talking about.  Granted, we often use sarcasm on a whim without thinking, but misunderstanding through sarcasm can be explained in the nature of sarcasm.  Sarcasm implies a shared context between the people involved, and those outside of that context do not understand the language that is being used.  It is an easy example of the role context plays in our lives.

Coming back from college has been essentially a journey back into the context that I had been a part of for the first 18-19 years of my life.  Unsurprisingly, that context has changed in many ways and I do not play the same role that I used to play. This is not a bad thing, but rather the natural result of being gone for 4 months.  This has definitely taken some adjusting; sometimes I almost feel out of place since I have been gone from my Dallas context for so long.  I now understand why my older friends are sometimes so anxious to get back to school, the context in which they feel the most at home.

It takes much work and initiative in order to re-involve oneself in a previous context.  With my family, it takes a lot of talking about the events that have taken place in their lives and mine over the past 4 months.  It may seem redundant and awkward at first, but in the end, it is necessary in order to do life with your family and old friends again.  Even though you may have been great friends before, it is often necessary to "get acquainted" once again, or else your relationship may end up shallow, something that I try to avoid in my life.  In a nutshell, getting back into the swing of things at home is a lot of work (I really wish my transition sentences were this good while I was still in composition.... Check back in later for my next post).