A Christmas Contemplation

 I love Christmas.

I love the family time and the food and the ugly sweater parties. I love the snow (when we have it) and the hot cocoa and our quirky Christmas tree with its motley assortment of ornaments. This season brings so many good things along with it.

This year, though, it’s been a little harder to get into the “Christmas spirit.” We haven’t had much snow, and what with the semester flying by so fast, it seems like Christmas has been hiding behind the giant Santa inflatable in my neighbor’s yard for the last month and a half, and just now decided to jump out at us. I’ve thought about this apparent dryness in the season a lot, pondering what could possibly be lacking.

Maybe I don’t own enough Christmas socks.

Maybe we need to bake more delicious and festive treats.

Maybe I should make it a point to play only Christmas music from this point on.

But really, the more I ponder that question, the more I get to feeling that depending on all of those things to get us into the Christmas spirit is what causes us to miss the whole point of all of it.

By now, most of us are mature enough to readily agree that no, Christmas is not about getting presents. Christmas is not about being miserly and shouting “Bah! Humbug.” against the wind. What it’s really about, children, is giving, we say. Christmas is about family. It’s about being charitable and finding joy in what we have and “believing in magic.”

Wrong.

Christmas is not about any of those things. Those things, while all are good and generally admirable things, are not, and should never be, at the center of our focus. When that happens, we get trapped in this little snow globe of expectations about what Christmas should feel like, and we start forcing ourselves to do more and be more, wondering why we still can’t quite achieve the feeling of Christmas about which we have become so nostalgic. All this striving distracts us from the truth we don’t know we’re looking for. The truth that, despite all the hype, Christmas is about something far more powerful, far more extreme and far more world-shaking than our little watered-down, Santa-is-coming-to-town, romanticized-Nativity-scene version.

And it’s so easy to agree with that statement, isn’t it?

“Well, of course Jesus is the reason for the season,” we cry, shaking our fists at the tyranny of society’s materialism, while blatantly ignoring the fact that that phrase is one of the biggest cop-outs in the history of the universe. It’s a cop-out because it allows us to feel justified and righteous, without getting so deep as to become uncomfortable. Then we can go back to our fruitless search for meaning through festivity.

If you celebrate Christmas (and I hope you do, because it’s pretty much the best thing ever), my prayer for you and for all of us this year is that we can finally begin to deeply comprehend the meaning of the Christmas story-the story of a God so radical, so extreme, that He did the most miraculous thing the world has ever seen. The story of a king becoming the lowest of the low, all because He loved a few humble peasants enough to endure any and all suffering to save them.

The Creator of the universe calls us to let His story, the Christmas story, become our own. Because He loves his creation, and refuses to give up on those He loves. And that’s the truth.

Merry Christmas.

Finals are pointless

 Ah, finals week.

It’s amazing how much that one simple phrase communicates. Just three words, and probably half of you fainted dead away with the sheer force of mental exhaustion conveyed.

I’ll wait while someone gets the smelling salts.

…

… And now that we’ve all overcome our trauma, I have a story for you.

It was Tuesday of finals week, and I strutted across campus in recital attire, confident in the knowledge that my piano jury was going to absolutely ROCK. (For you muggles out there, a jury is like a final exam, but for musicians.)

For this occasion, I had chosen the best and most impressive repertoire in my piano arsenal. Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in c# minor–you know, the one with the big, bell-like chords and really fast middle section–and Chopin’s Prelude in Db major (or “Raindrops” Prelude). With such a set, I was prepared not only to rock my jury, but to own it. Perhaps even… to kill it.

Arriving a good 30 minutes before my scheduled jury time, I locked myself in a practice room (my favorite one with the temperamental Steinway) and ran through my set. It was glorious and thrilling and everything I had worked so hard for it to be. Yes, this jury would be dead before it even had the chance to expound on my expert technique.

10:00 arrived. I walked into Dr. Sidebottom’s office, where he and one of the other piano professors waited to judge my performance (no, his name isn’t actually Dr Sidebottom; that’s just a ridiculous pseudonym I contrived out of respect for his privacy, you naive muggle, you). When I took my seat, something about the bench felt a little off, so I readjusted it until it was the proper distance from the piano. I still sensed a weird kind of awkwardness, like when you feel a phantom hair brushing your arm, but no matter how hard you try to find it, it won’t show itself, leaving you to wonder if chemistry class has finally sapped the last of your sanity. I dismissed this feeling as nerves or some such nonsense.

Oh, how wrong I was.

About three measures into the Rachmaninoff, the problem revealed itself to me. The piano bench was set roughly five feet higher than is generally acceptable, thanks to the lunatic who played before me. And you wouldn’t think something like that would matter as much as it did, but it was just enough to throw off the entire balance. It’s not often I get the opportunity to blunder through a performance with that level of mediocrity, but fate had presented me with the chance of a lifetime, and I took full advantage of it, kicking myself repeatedly the whole way down.

“Good job,” said my professor at the end of the piece. I pictured him wincing behind my back.

“@$#&!,” I replied (silently).

After that ordeal, I made sure to adjust the bench to the right height before playing the Chopin artfully. My professors lauded my musicianship, but I left feeling disillusioned with the knowledge that Rachmaninoff would surely have scoffed at my painful rendering of his masterpiece.

Walking back to my dorm, it occurred to me that I was nowhere near as dejected as I would have been had such misfortune befallen me a year or even six months before. Even though my jury hadn’t been nearly as successful as I’d expected, there was no familiar crushing weight of humiliation to slow my steps. I was disappointed, for sure, but I also had this strange feeling of rightness as I left the whole experience behind me. And it struck me how we humans like to do this to ourselves–the whole “everything is leading up to one ultimate peak and if I screw anything up at that point my life is over and I might as well just go live in a box next to the interstate” thing. What also struck me was how stupid and unhealthy and fruitless that notion is.

I mean, we go our whole lives being pushed toward deadline after deadline. First it’s preschool, then it’s elementary school graduation, then it’s the three years of hell that is middle school, then high school graduation, then quick, get yourself a degree so you can start a career before the age of 25 and make bucketloads of money, so that then you can finally have peace and security for your future retirement from that much-desired career. And that’s if everything goes according to plan. If you get that 4.0 GPA and ace all your juries and make friends with all the right people. Forget all those dreams you had before, about having a family and a dog and going to Europe to see the castles and dungeons complete with medieval torture chambers. Forget about finding enjoyment in the creation of art, and experience for experience’s sake. Forget about living.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have goals. Goals give us motivation and help us live with more purpose. But letting your joy be dependent on the realization of those goals will always be a mistake. Because we can’t do everything we set out to do. We’re all just a bunch of flawed people trying to get everything right, failing epically more times than not. And sometimes, we have to let ourselves be okay with that, and move on.

“Finals” doesn’t mean “your last chance ever to prove your worth as a human being.” Don’t give that word more credit than it deserves. They’re called finals because they’re the final tests of the semester. That’s all. No fireworks. No nails in the coffin. Just a convenient way to signal the end of something. Like the two words I’m about to use right now in an attempt to make the conclusion of this blog post pithy rather than cheesy.

THE END

My muse, the hermit

 I’ve never been one to write for an agenda, and that’s because of two things:

1. I refuse to write preachy, detached poetry that doesn’t resonate in some way with my eternal soul. As a result of this, I spend a lot of time just waiting for inspiration to hit me like a subtle and flighty dump truck.
2. Inspiration and I have somewhat of a contract, the terms thereof being: it is free to come and go as it pleases, with little regard for my schedule or my feelings, and I can choose whether or not to entertain it.

Ours has always been a love-hate relationship, but since I started college, that relationship has become even more strained. I think my muse is jealous that I now have something called “responsibilities”, and has been punishing me for this infraction by burying itself halfway into the dirt of my subconscious like some weird little gnomish mind-hermit. A hermit that only deigns to emerge about once every full moon.

As frustrating as that can be, the famine of truly genuine inspiration that I’ve been experiencing has taught me to appreciate it more, especially when I end up discovering a poem like this one inside myself.

 

Wipeout

A bike is freedom,

childhood on wheels.

Wind-whipped hair,

rubber flexing on asphalt

while spectating trees

applaud your daredevil speed,

showering leaves like roses.

 

To him, that bike

is freedom.

Until ten-year-old bravado

betrays him

and tires skid,

scattering red and gold.

His flight is tainted magic.

Rather inflexible,

that asphalt.

 

(There IS a story here-a story involving me and a hill and a bike named “Wipeout”. I might tell it to you someday.)

So it begins...

I’ve started a lot of things in my life.

Essays.

Sandwiches.

Fights over the remote control.

Never in my life, however, have I started a blog. I am entirely new to this game, and I don’t really know the rules. I’m not very “hip to the jive”, as the kids say.

But I started this blog because often I have things to say. Things I think are important, or funny, or poetic. And I generally prefer saying things when someone is listening to me (although, admittedly, that hasn’t really stopped me before). So here’s a blog. You’re welcome, world.

In regards to that, here are a few things you should know; a disclaimer, if you will:

1. My Lord of the Rings references will never stop. If that scares you, you must never have had the pleasure of meeting a Nazgul.
2. Content will range from poetry to anecdotes to general musings about this whole life thing. I’ll try and keep controversial issues to a minimum (but I make no promises that everything I write will make you feel good inside).
3. Under no circumstances will I ever presume to guarantee regularly scheduled posts, as I have a rule against telling vicious lies (accidentally or otherwise).

If you’re reading this, cheers to you! I look forward to seeing where this blogging journey of epic proportions takes us.

~Samantha