If your ultimate good is salvation then no one can truly harm you, for no one can take that good away from you.  It is always in your power to do what will move you closer to it.

Be before seeming or you will seem without being.

Your life should be good for the lives of those around you.  No matter what time period you were born into, or what people you were born around, you should be a variable that always makes things better. 

When you feel damaged the challenge is to not seek damage in return.  Remember: no one can truly harm you.

Love means you try to prove yourself wrong when you think someone else has some particular fault.

I long greatly for the day when the value of all things will be revealed.

I am what is wrong with the world.

Someday, death will repaint everything with new colors.  Someday we will see how blind we were.  If only any of this were easy.

I’m growing up, and one of the most important parts of growing up is to learn what parts of you should never grow up.  Here are five attitudes kids have that are important to keep.

Animals. Kids have a deep wonder about animals, and have compassion on them when they are hurt.

Snow. Kids love snow, the earth’s magical wintertime clothing. Adults hate it because it gets on their car and clothes and makes it harder to drive.

Money. Kids don’t think about money. Adults think about money a lot and often forget why they even want it. The point of money is to use it on people, on serving, on the actual goods of life. Money should be thought about as little as possible, as a dirty thought, as an inconvenience to get through.

Strangers. Kids are either shy or excited around strangers. The important thing is to never feel comfortable because you feel superior, or perhaps even worse, to feel nothing at all in the presence of other people.

Goodbyes. As a kid you always hate goodbyes. Friends are everything.

I hate goodbyes. I hate them so much. I think the reason people stop being affected by them is that they think happiness is the goal of life, so you should revise what you think is valuable in the world so that you are happy. If you lower the value of people you’ve said goodbye to, you are happier.

But I don’t think happiness is the goal of life.

Future self. You better still have these attitudes. And if you have kids, make sure they know these things should never be drowned out. That they always have a choice. That people don’t see these things anymore because they have forgotten values they once knew, not because they have found something better that can’t include these things. It is always ok to have these attitudes. It’s important to not grow up all the way. 

And if we do, what a world we’ve forgotten.

Unless they mug you.  Then they weren’t thinking the same thing.

People compare lovers to fish by saying ‘there are lots of fish in the sea’ and ‘she was the one that got away’.  But whenever I go up to a girl at a bar and say “You are a really great fish” they always get mad and walk away.

Maybe penguins think that humans waddle, and when they do it they are actually making fun of us.  (waddle waddle)  “Hey guys, look at me, I’m a human.” 

All animals can talk but parrots are the only ones who have been caught by humans – so they covered for it by repeating everything the humans said from then on.  “Hey were you just talking? Hey were you just talking?”

I saw a sign earlier that said ‘No Littering’ and said ’$500 fine’ right below it.  What a stupid law – how does it make any sense to fine people $500 for not littering?  In any case, I got out of there fast because I didn’t have anything to litter.

It’s slushy day outside. For once I wish slushy day would be strawberry flavored.  Maybe next time.  Ok bye.

I peeked in the door, my hand clasped on the edge of it as my wide eyes trembled in wonder.

“Come in,” croaked a gnarly voice just ahead.  I poked in with my body, and saw the great man gazing at me over his spectacles.  He had been reading at his desk but was now looking up at me though his hand still clutched the paper.  “Please,” he said lifting his hand, “take a seat.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m the director.  I’m in charge of the operation here.”

“You can tell me what I want to know?”

“I can even tell you whether you even really want to know it.”

“What’s going on here?”

“Well, you have a body, a pumping heart, a membranous brain, revolving eyes, free-roaming hands.  Your pivot point is your head and you can tell it where to look and command your tongue what to say.”

“I know.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“What is this ache I feel?”

“You miss someone.”

“That,” I said with a sudden urgency, “What is that?”

The director paused and took off his glasses.  He took them with one hand and dangled them in his mouth as he swiveled his chair so he was looking at me sideways.

“There are parts of the program that are experimental in nature.”

“It hurts so bad.  I can feel it, in my stomach.  But it’s not in my stomach all the same.  It’s in the air around me, like I’m swimming through nothing since none of it contains them.”

“We needed a way to make sure subjects would gather together.” 

I had been looking up at him but it was painful so I looked at my hands.  This was something he knew I didn’t want to know.

“So,” he went on.  “We gave every person a contagion, something that makes them in some way attractive to others.  Each person’s contagion affects some people more than others.  Some will catch it very badly, and when that person is gone the contagion stays.  That’s the aching feeling.”

“Will it ever go away?”

“It fades with time.”

“Why can’t it leave now?  It is so much. I see no reason to sleep, but no reason to stay awake.  It’s like nothing has the meaning it had before.”

“If each person has a contagion, that contagion by necessity affects people as much as they catch it.  It can affect them no less.”

“But it goes away?”

“Yes…you will forget.  You cannot keep a feeling forever.  The feeling of that person will slowly drip out of you until the well is dry, and all that is left is the beaker where the contagion once was.  But you will feel them no more.”

“But the contagion…I thought you said it had to affect peope. That it was real. That they were real.”  My eyes looked hard at the grizzled man.  His stony voice drummed an ironcast certainty into my heart, and I felt afraid I was losing the last part of me I had sought to protect, that I had hoped would be the one thing in me to last to the end of my time.

“The person remains a very real person.  But their contagion only affects you as much as it is allowed in you on a constant basis.  Whatever separates you from its source, whether it be space, time, or will, separates you from it completely.  As the last of the contagion drains from you, the ache will leave, and that person will be nought but a hollow memory.  You will see their figure in your mind but know nothing, for the only way to know a person is to have both the contagion and its source.  There is no other way.  If they leave, they remain real, while you know none of it.”

“But aren’t they in a way less real?” I wondered aloud, thinking of my already fading thoughts.  “We keep living without them…it is sort of like their time is over.”

“What makes the past any less real than the present?”

“It is gone.  It isn’t real anymore.”

“A good memory is nothing but a democracy where every moment is allowed a full vote.  We are biased for the present only because it seems more real, not because it is more real.  But agents have poor memories, and so the truths of past moments eventually fall out.”

“But how can that be? If something is real, how can our memories not be good enough to hold onto it? If they don’t, what good are they?” My voice shook as my angry wonder gushed forth. 

“As I said…a contagion must be connected to its source. Or else it dies. It was real, fully real, but eventually it slides into the past, and you have no way to access it.” 

“But I ache so strongly,” I pleaded, ”I don’t want them to go away.  I don’t want my memory to not be able to find them.  I don’t want to be trapped by place and time to not have and see and know them.  I don’t care where I am, I just want them here with me.”

“I’m sorry.  As I said, it’s experimental.”

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S EXPERIMENTAL? YOU MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW?”

“We had to find a way for people to come together, but also a way to move on…”

“So you make us erase people?  You make our minds delete a person we loved?  But it’s all a lie, a lie of time and space?”

“It’s not a lie.”

“Well then I don’t what you call it, but it’s not real. I feel shriveled, drying up inside, dead to everything, I want them so bad, but it will all go away, but not for any reason? Just because it’s experimental?  They are still wonderful – their contagion is still as real as ever – but you make us fickle beings, beings that lose the truth, beings that forget?”

“Yes. We knew there would be backlash. The trick is to discover which agents will backlash before putting them into the system, which agents won’t consent to having a contagion and interacting with others’ contagions.  We are still working on that.”  His eyes glowered steadily over his almond colored desk covered with papers.

“This feeling, this sad feeling. I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Accept it. That’s what makes things easiest, we’ve found.”

“Mr. Director,” I said in a measured drawl, ”have you ever missed someone?”

“No. As Director of Operations I also oversee research, so I have to remain impartial.”

“Then you have no idea.  You just have no idea.” 

“Would you like to withdraw your consent to participate?”

“No.  I am sad and I don’t know how you could do this to us, and this feeling is so overwhelming I feel I will never sleep again.  But I am going to go now.”

“Where are you going to go?” he asked with perched eyebrows.

“I don’t know but somewhere that’s not here. Somewhere where I won’t know that we just forget people and that’s the end of it. Somewhere I’ll think that I’ll hang onto people forever, because they’re worth hanging onto.  A place where I can feel my ache and not feel sorry for it.  Where I can think that I have it because someone gave it to me, and that means that person is real, and I know them, and I wish that they were with me.  Because that feeling means that people exist and are good, and that’s what keeps me alive.”

I stood up, slid back my chair and stood before him with my fists clenched tight.  I looked at him with taut cheeks for a moment, then I sidestepped my chair and walked out, closing the door behind me.

Sometimes when someone thinks a police officer did a bad job they say ‘My precious tax dollars at work’.  And if the road is crumbling they think, ‘I paid my good money for this road’.  And when they read about the war they muse, ‘Of course they won, they were financed by my hard earned money’.   

Eventually the same person over time has assumed they are responsible for billions of dollars of government expenses.  Their money has built all the highways, financed the entire police force, and gone towards several successful invasions. 

To remedy this I think the government should inform us specifically on how our tax dollars are spent.  Then I can say, ‘You know the stoplight at the intersection High and Lane? Yeah, my 2008 taxes bought a 1/55th of that.  And what a great stoplight, am I right?’ 

‘Oh….mine bought the ambassador to Turkey a new pair of pants.’ 

‘Ha! Were they at least nice pants?’

‘Not really.’

This would probably make people a little more upset about their money being used the wrong way. Or, it could make people really competetive about financing the good stuff.  I mean really, the ambassador to Turkey did need some quality canvas pants.  He soiled his other ones playing golf on the coast of the Black Sea.  And a man’s got to feel good while golfing, or his score just plummets. 

And on that note, the venerable diplomat could definitely use a new pair of clubs.  Apparently the Prime Minister is a fervent golf enthusiast.  Relations with Turkey depend vitally on the ambassador’s competitiveness. 

Any for volunteering their taxes for a new pair of clubs? Anyone?  Or maybe giving up their golf clubs for a tax break?

Yesterday I wafted here and there, exploring the places that people go.  If I go a lot of places in one day, by the end of it I feel like I am in all those places at once, and the world seems huge and exploding with life.  The sky was big too, yesterday, and contrails raced across it like the students who glided across campus. 

In the library there is this room called the quiet room.  I’m not sure if it’s called the quiet room, but everyone is quiet in it, so it might as well be called the quiet room.  It is large and cavernous and if you zip up your bookbag everyone knows it and looks at you.  One of the hardest times I have ever laughed was when my friend Erik said he wanted to bring a typewriter in there, and then when people would look at him because of the really loud keys he would say, ‘What? I’m writing a paper.’ 

I was thinking about old things yesterday.  I found a collection of Atlantic Monthly in big hardbound books that go back to 1912.  The first thing I thought is, wow, the joke is on people who paid for subscriptions all those years, because I can look at them for free.  The second thing I thought is, I should read one of these.

I took out one from 1934 and sat down in the quiet room.  The first article I flipped open to was about all the things humans had found about the universe recently.  Until recent they had thought there was only the Milky Way, but telescopes had determined that there were myriads of ‘island-universes’ out there, spiraling just like the Milky Way at enormous velocities.  The author was trying to advocate for creations of bigger telescopes to find even more things, but I was thinking ‘Wow, in 1934 we had just found out about other galaxies’. 

Most of the time I think about history I imagine that people have always known about other galaxies.  But if arriving means knowing where you are, then humans really only just got here.

I continued to flip through the yellowing pages, which were soft and tore very easily, and I found an article by a man who was asked by the editor of the magazine to explain why he was a Christian.  The article was enchanting, and ended with this:

“There died, last Eastertide, in Virginia, a man who had given his life to teaching young men—Dr. W Crosby Bell.  As a religious philosopher he faced frankly the problems of faith.  The evening before he died he asked to know the truth, and he was told that he could not recover.  Before he lapsed into unconsciousness he insisted on dictating a message to his students.  I pass it on, in the hope that it may encourage and strengthen others in the pathway to faith.  ‘Tell the boys,’ he said ‘that I have grown surer of God every day of my life, and I’ve never been so sure as I am now. Why, it’s all so!  It’s a fact; it’s a dead certainty . . . I’ve always thought so, and now that I’m up against it, I know . . . Tell them I say “good-bye”—they’ve been a joy to me.  I’ve had more than any man that ever lived, and life owes me nothing.  I’ve had work I loved and I’ve lived in a beautiful place among congenial friends.  I’ve had love in its highest form and I’ve got it forever.  I can see now that death is just the smallest thing—just an incident—and it means nothing. I know.“

As I read that article I slowly woke up.  By the end, I felt like I had remembered all the reasons why I worship.  Those fading moments, when a man is given to honesty about all that he has been given here on earth, light the way for us who do not have the benefit of death’s immediate presence.

It was a strange day and it gave me a whispery feeling of truths around each corner.  The universe stretches far outward and the past stretches far backward and life reaches far inward.  What a curious place man occupies in the picture of all things.

Later, as I drifted off to sleep in an armchair on the warm and bright afternoon, the words slowly descended on my mind, you cannot be sad and grateful at the same time.  And that’s when I realized, you need a lot of justification to be sad.  Look around: are there really more things in this world that you can hate than you can love?

Don’t forget to be happy.

I remember my parents having potluck church meetings at our house when I was a little kid. The adults would all systematically get their food and then stand around talking to each other, and the listening person would nod, and the person talking always sounded like they knew what they were talking about. But me, I would run around with the other kids, going into the different rooms, wandering as a curious nomad who didn’t really know why everyone had come over. I can still see through my eyes then, looking up at how tall they were. To me adults were this whole other creature. They obviously knew what it was all about, because they go through some sort of training or something, so that when they’re in these conversations with other adults they know exactly what to say. I can’t describe it really. I just remember thinking that the adults in our kitchen and living room and family room all seemed to have this certain confidence, like adults were super heroes who knew everything and had everything under control.

And it wasn’t just adults in my house for potluck dinners. It was adults everywhere. They all had this hidden understanding with each other, the shared assumption of what made them all adults. It’s what let them drive cars, buy things at the store, call each other on the phone, talk at parties with each other. And since they all seemed so sure, so confident in these things, I assumed that meant they knew everything, that they knew just what to do in life, that they were perfect.

In 2011 the number one thing I learned is that the idea of adults is a myth.

One of the things I always thought as a kid – just because I was a kid, and kids believe whatever occurs to them – is that adults were adults because they chose to be. The aged nature of adults always seemed like it was their fault, like they were responsible that they looked like a middle-aged person. When I saw the pictures of all the presidents I would blame them for being adults, I would think that those were the faces that they deserved. It never occurred to me that our bodies get bigger and older whether we like it or not.

And there is no system that makes sure you know everything. When you’re standing at parties there isn’t some test that you’ve passed to be there. There is no worldwide organization to make sure everyone’s on the same page, because everyone isn’t on the same page. No one grants an ‘adult certificate’. Your limbs just keep growing and that’s what gets you into the adult club. And that’s it.

In October I had to say goodbye to my friend Danielle. She was moving away so we had dinner, and she said she couldn’t believe that she had just graduated college, that she has to get a job all of a sudden, just like that. I could hear her voice echoing to me from years past, from the days she walked around beneath the plates of big people at parties. Wasn’t it just yesterday it felt like adults were these whole other people? But suddenly she was inside the conversation of the big people, and I was too: we were people who had the confidence to go to a restaurant, and buy things, and talk like we knew something. But on the inside I was shocked to find that neither of us felt ready at all, that we didn’t feel we belonged in these humongous bodies, that you don’t choose adulthood, that there is some invisible hand that’s pushing you forward in life, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

The idea of adults is a myth. There are no super people, people who know everything.

One thing adults always seemed was calm; emotions apparently became steady and smooth as an adult. But over the summer I watched a show called Mad Men. Watching that show I saw how the most successful of adults feels raging jealousy, that they are angry, petty, anxious, that they cheat on each other, they want revenge, they squabble, they yell, they whimper and beg, they feel sad and worn out, they need love just as much as kids, if not more. The emotional idea I had of adults is a myth.

I also had the idea that adults never do anything wrong. But I saw my boss, the leader who is in charge of everything because he’s an ‘adult’, get things wrong. My parents, as much as the suspicion lurked in me growing up that one day I would find they were right about everything, got things wrong. I had someone end their friendship with me without trying to talk about things, without hoping we could understand each other. Adults are not moral gods. Becoming an adult is not a moral stamp; it’s just a stamp of time. And time doesn’t improve things; people do. If you do nothing to improve, nothing will make you.

One of the most impactful conversations I had in 2011 was in the month of May. When I was in middle school I started running, and I looked up to the seniors in high school – one in particular – as absolute gods. I would never be as fast as them, I knew for sure. The best one should have won the state mile his senior year, but he barely lost. He graduated right when I entered high school, so I never really got to meet him. Then this past May I stood by the track where I went to high school as lightning filled the sky, delaying the scheduled race for that evening. I ended up talking to him, and in the conversation he told me he had been divorced. The image, the one of him as the perfect person in running and everything else, shattered instantly. That image had been in my mind for eight years.

I looked up at all the big people and thought they had it all figured out. I had no idea.

But sometimes, I find, it even slips into the assumption of adults. One thing goes right, and then maybe another, and the assumption of knowledge and indomitability slowly nestles itself into our conversations. We act like the idea of adults that is a myth of the childhood imagination. But years from now, when we are looking back at our lives at this point when we spoke so confidently, we will see the faults we didn’t realize we had.

I never want to pretend I have everything figured out for the sake of preserving the idea of an ‘adult’. I never want to think my answer must be right because the person I’m talking to is younger than me. I’ve grown up and found out that even adults are confused, and that no one really knows what’s going on, and that’s crazy. I never want to think I know more than I do, I never want to accept that the size of my body gives me a right to an adult-sized confidence. I know what I know, and the rest of what I want to say is because of a cultural idea, a social idea, the all-powerful idea of being an adult. But in 2011, I found out that idea is a myth.

Let me never grow out of being a child in my soul. I want painfully and dearly to not become an adult who is blind to everything in the world, who can’t see every arriving moment as strange and beautiful. Being an adult doesn’t make life any less strange or odd; we’re still here for the first time, just like we were as kids.

I never thought I’d grow up. But here I am. I guess I just have to go with it.