Life Lessons – Page 9 – Chloe J Sayers

Observation

People-watching, the nice word for staring absently at everyone around you, is incredibly interesting and telling. As much as I love to observe those who surround me, I also like to self-watch. I try to separate the me that is aware of my surroundings and motivations and internal thoughts from my actual actions. I pretend that I am someone else and observe what I do in given circumstances. It’s a bit bizare but rather revealing.

Major Observation #1: My reactions to happinness and stress and sadness and anger in life are all exactly the same. When my emotions go to any extremes I generally isolate myself through headphones or location and scribble madly on a notebook or type wildly into this blog.

Major Observation #2: Even though I write just as much when I am experiencing negative emotions as the positive ones, I rarely share the more “downer” pieces. Mostly becaue I feel that my other writings aren’t as good and the world has enough hurt without me adding to it. This being said, it isn’t too hard to figure out when I’m having a splendid day (like today). It’s a bit more tricky the other way around unless you belong to the small group of people that can read me with scary accuracy.

Minor Observation #3: I actually don’t have a minor observation. Or another major one. I just felt that if I had major observations than I should have minor ones as well. For balance’s sake.

About Me, Happiness, Life Lessons

Living Life Differently

She never was content with doing the same thing the same way more than once. After she mastered tying her shoes, she had to do it faster and then with her eyes closed. If she could do a trick on her scooter using her right foot, then it must be completed with the left. Anyone can walk through the house with in the daylight or with the lights on but not many people can master the steep stairs in pitch darkness. But she could.

The English language was far to straight-forward, she made up her own modes of communication. The inanimate objects that surround us must serve some higher purpose, she assigned them personalities and goals and gave life to a weary world.

This world could not contain her, logic and gravity had no claim on her soul. There were infinite lands to be explored and infinite ideas to be born.

This wasn’t a hectic rush to break social norms but an intentional oblivion to society’s restrictive ideas of how to live. This wasn’t being an individual just for the sake of standing out in the crowd but forgetting that the crowd existed. This was forgetting that the wind tangled others’ hair and that the sun warmed others’ faces. This was forgetting that the map of life already had boundaries etched into it and a compass pointing everyone in the same direction. This was living life differently.

Happiness, Life Lessons, Writing

The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

Cliches should be avoided like the plague. If placed in a paper, they will be the death of said assignment. Perhaps you are so unfortunate to have slipped one into conversation with a Cliche Catcher nearby. You know these people. As soon as you even start to say…”well, you know, the apple doesn’t…”

BAM!! They’ll interrupt you. Every time. With the one cliche that evidently is acceptable to use, because these Cliche Catchers will throw it in the middle of your sentence before that poor apple could even think about falling.

“That’s so cliche!” the Cliche Catcher says (extra emphasis on the “so”) Using common phrases and idioms is evidently no longer allowed. It’s just so……so cliche. Avoid at all costs.

If you haven’t picked up on the sarcastic undertones yet, I personally find cliches to be useful at times. An entire conversation of them might be annoying, but there is one that I find to be rather true.

“It’s the small things in life that count” (or some derivative thereof). I’d like to take that one step further. If you stop enjoying and finding joy in the small things, eventually you will stop finding happiness in the big excitements as well. You keep looking for something bigger and bigger to satisfy this need for the interesting, the new, the exciting, the fun. The problem occurs because eventually there won’t be anything bigger and bigger. What happens then?

Perhaps you stop the break-neck pace. Perhaps you slow down and listen to frosty leaves flitting through the branches of the tree with speckled bark. You begin to notice the adorable quirks of your best friends. You rediscover the joy of an old song or book. You enjoy life because you are living it.

People

Sushi and Diamonds

I am the type of person who cannot be within eyesight of a sign, posting, notice, billboard, book, graphitti, pamphlet without reading it. I will read the same sign over and over just because it is there. So, when riding in the car, I pay attention to what’s on the other side of the tinted glass.

We were just outside of Pittsburg and I saw a billboard that had a picture of a diamond being held by a pair of tweezers. I looked away for a second and on a closer look, I realized that I had mistaken what was truly a piece of round sushi and chopsticks for exquisite jewelry. An honest and harmless mistake.

While misidentifying images may be relatively harmless (with the minor exception of street signs while driving), when we begin to categorize and identify people based on first impressions we run serious risks.

It might have been said that first impressions are important. I’d like to add that they are wrong 95% of the time. If I can’t tell a roll of sushi apart from a diamond, then I surely can’t accurately assess someone within five minutes of knowing them. I shouldn’t be assessing them at all. Just enjoying getting to know another story and friend. Yet it is far too easy to fall into a faulty first impression judgement.

I mislabeled the billboard advertisement because I looked at it too quickly. You can’t possibly expect to know someone after a brief meeting, especially depending on the circumstance and opportunity for true conversation. I also got my diamonds and sushi confused because I had seen a billboard with tweezers and a diamond before. I wasn’t expecting to see sushi, so I fit it into a mold that I already knew.

How many times do you meet someone and say, “You are just like my friend so and so!” Or at least think it. Except they aren’t. Because they can’t be. We are who we are, nothing more and nothing less. Squeezing people into cold metal molds is great if you want a bunch of friends that are exactly who you think they should be but nothing like who they really are.

I think it’s time to get our eyes checked.

Friendship, Life Lessons

Eighteen

Before I went to college, I always thought it was too bad that I was turning 18 when I would have just been at college for a month. Surely, I thought, there was no way I would have a group of friends to celebrate with that fast. I mean, I’m not the type of person that makes friends fast. My best friends from high school I knew for many years before we made that final leap into “best friendhood”.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Today was the best birthday I have ever had and that is including the two midterms I had to take today. It’s not just because I’m finally an adult (voting and infomercial shopping anyone?). It’s because today was a wonderful blend of realizing how much I belong here and what wonderful friends I still have from back home. I didn’t even know that the two could coexist so nicely before today.

Making friends here was so much more beautiful than I thought it would be. It wasn’t just easier because everyone was freshmen and wanting to make friends, it was significant because it was still sincere even if it was fast. So to all the wonderful people I have met, and the ones I have yet to meet: thank you. As individuals, as a collective whole, we are a part of something very unique and special here.

Holding onto the friends from home was a great deal harder than I expected. My tendancy is to live fully wherever I am and with whoever I am nearby. Technology aids maintaining connections but I love real conversations with real people. I’m fully aware of the wonderful things Skype can do but there is a drastic difference between a scheduled “skype date” and just sharing the little joys of life with people as they come up. I believe I fall short in this area of long-distance friendships consistently and while my past history makes my upcoming statement less than trustworthy, I truly wish to improve upon this. So to all the wonderful people that have been a part of my life, you aren’t rid of me yet.

I believe I started off this post as something about my birthday yet I digress more than I ever stay on topic. In short, my birthday was amazing because it contained wonderful people and friends and family and love and connections and for me, that is all I could ever wish for.

Happiness, Life Lessons, Writing

Logic-less

I really am spending more time writng than I ought. I should be reading and memorizing and studying. I feel that’s a bit unfair though. If I’m expected to keep soaking up information and knowledge, creating these giant stockpiles of thoughts in my brain than I think I should be allowed to turn the tables sometimes and release these ideas.

Besides, my entrepreneurship classes and books are always encouraging us to write and be creative. I like it when I can find other things to justify myself with rather than just my own logic.

I realized lately that I do that a lot. I create these little rules and mannerisms that help guide my life along. No one else follows them but I don’t expect them to. I like the idea that I can create up my own words if the ones I’ve been given aren’t working properly. I like that I can create my own paths if the ones that are offered don’t look like ones I want to sojourn down.

Today, I am in one of the best moods possible as a result of a severe lack of sleep and a good amount of coffee. I am just tired enough where nothing bothers me and have enough caffiene in my system to make everything peaceful and happy. It’s one of those moods where I am almost impossible to knock down. I don’t have to look for the silver lining on days like today. All I can see is the silver, the clouds aren’t even existent. I burned my tongue on my precious coffee today and instead of registering the pain, I smiled because my coffee was still hot. Perhaps this foolish happinness is completely irrational, but I am determined to enjoy it today.

One of those little rules that I have is that I have empowered myself to dictate what kind of day I am going to have. I decide whether it will be a happy day, a tired day, a reflective day, a sad day, and whatnot. The type of day I have is completely distinct from my circumstances. Its some kind of buffer I give myself that is built on a solid foundation of dellusion and denial. It’s probably unhealthy, but it works quite well for me.

That’s another rule: I can do things that don’t make sense but if they work, I can continue doing them. Today is a happy day. As was yesterday. Tomorrow is looking pretty good too. Once I started deciding what kind of day I was going to have (I began this a few months ago) I have found that is very convenient to choose to have happy days the majority of time. If you could pick what your day was going to be like, wouldn’t you go for the best possible?

About Me, Church Life, Friendship, Life Lessons

A Step Back

There is something incredibly powerful about being in community. Its encouraging, enlightening, and empowering. If you are slightly introverted like myself, it is also exhausting. Which is why I have learned the value of taking a step back.

Taking a step back from a stressful situation can reintroduce the big picture into your stream of consciousness.

Taking a step back from your inner turmoil can help you reprioritize.

Taking a step back from the constantly streaming to-do list, post-it notes, deadlines, and responsibilities can help you be human.

Tonight, taking a step back meant sitting in the chapel garden and gazing at underlit leaves that seemed to shine against the pitch black night. Instead of standing shoulder to shoulder in a hot, packed, chapel, I sat alone on a bench and closed my eyes and felt the cool of stillness. In no way am I insinuating that I felt ostracized from worship or this beneficial gathering.

Sometimes, there is greater beauty in the observance than the participation. To be still for a few minutes and hear at least a hundred of my classmates sing that “naught be all else to me save what thou art” was moving to say the least. There is nothing wrong with group worship and it is an amazing thing. Yet sometimes, it makes it too easy for me to focus on me. My worship, my experience, my catharsis. Taking a step back allows me to realign.

I want to walk around seeing the value in everything: every person, experience, and situation instead of walking around only focusing on what will validate me.

Change, Church Life, God, Life Lessons

Church “Shopping”

I hate the term church shopping. I absolutely hate it but that’s exactly what I’ve done for the past three Sundays. First off, it assumes that I am going to church to get something for myself, like you would go to Meijers to buy food or Target to buy, well, everything. I’m not. I’m going to church to worship God and serve him.

Yet it’s so hard to know what church would be best (see, even the word best assumes some qualifications a church must meet to “suit” me and again, that is not what I want to be doing). So my subconscious starts to create a list of specifications and desires. You don’t want it to be all college students or all grandparents. You don’t want it to be all hymns or all Chris Tomlin. The sermon should be scripture-based not just a self-help guide read out loud. The list goes on and on and it makes me feel like a horrible person for even having it.

Second problem: there is some unspoken rule that you only have about 5 or 6 Sundays to “shop” churches and then you are being too particular or not receptive to the Holy Spirit or whatnot. I would absolutely love for the first church I walk into to be my home church and have a family there and feel like that this is where I need to serve God but it really doesn’t work that way. Considering there are 25+ churches in the area, this puts a lot of pressure on the preliminary church selections and really, there is only so much you can find out about a church from its website. You can’t get to know the people and see how authentic the worship is or if they will glare at you for not going to Sunday School (my experience this morning).

Perhaps the largest problem is that I don’t know where I should be. I’ve grown up in the same church all my life and I’m just now realizing what a blessing and a curse that was. I love that I know almost everyone and have a history there and that the worship is authentic and the preaching is sound but that’s all I’ve ever known. Do I limit myself and possibly God by choosing a church that is as North Oaksish as possible? I don’t think that is smart but I feel like I keep measuring up churches to my home church in the back of my mind. I’m in a new place of life and what was right for me last year might not be the same this year. Or it might be. I honestly have no idea. So I’m back to the drawing board, or more accurately, the praying board.

This concludes my rant on churches and the “shopping experience”. Thank you for reading.

P.S. Signs are really, really helpful and the lack of them is really, really frustrating.

About Me, Change, Life Lessons

The Essence of Me

I have a funny habit of running experiments on myself. Before you jump to any conclusions, I do not have little bubbling jars of neon liquids in my room (you’re welcome roommates) Its just that I like to gaze into the abyss that is the future, place myself there, observe how I think I’ll react to a new situation, and then see if my hypothesis is correct in post-future retrospect. That last sentence made absolutely no sense and I will now try to redeem it. Here is a practical example:

When arriving at college, the expectations and reputation that I had gathered as the Chloe of Clarkston disappeared. I knew this would be the case and so I was eagerly anticipating my actions, thoughts, friend choices, etc… to see who I would be. Turns out, I’m quite like the Chloe of Clarkston.

Instead of being disappointed that I didn’t create some whole new personality, I’m quite relieved. I am still spontaneously introverted, mysteriously happy in the morning no matter how much sleep I get, in love with my calender and post-its and color-coding, dedicated to studying to death, addicted to quality conversations, in awe of my amazing God, and loving the people around me.

Not much has changed, yet everything has changed. Everything external is different, new, and changing at a mile a minute. The essence of me; however, has been delightfully consistent. Of course, this means that I still am struggling through the same weaknesses but I have a new courage and drive to defeat them. I am completely open to change (see last post) but do not see myself surrendering my color-coding pens anytime soon. Speaking of, my calender is telling me that its time to continue my Genesis overload.

Until next time,
the Chloe of anywhere

Change, God, Happiness, Life Lessons

Life is wonderful.

I feel like I have lived a month in the past week and could probably write a good deal on first college experiences but I am currently enjoying just living life instead of dissecting it. So for now, I am putting away the scapel. This does not mean that I have nothing to say. My mind is whirling faster than it did before, just more about the width of the Fertile Cresent, how to balance equities, liabilities, and assets, and business plans then my normal introspective thoughts.

The one rather self-reflective thought that has been making its rounds however; is about the way I percieve myself and my surroundings now in contrast to what my viewpoint will be in two years, one month, five days. I certainly know that I am an incredibly different person than when I was in 9th grade, or even the beginning of 12th grade. It only makes sense then, that I will change within the next four years. I will see myself and everything else in this wonderful world very differently. I will probably look back at my state of mind right now and give myself one of those condescending little half-grins. I will probably read this in a year and laugh out loud.

I completely realize how ignorant I am about self-realization, even when I think that I have myself figured out. I used to reassure myself that I least understood myself. Now, I reassure myself that at least I know that I don’t understand myself. At least I am aware that I am unaware.

I am far too happy to end this post on that negative note. I am good, life is wonderful, and God is great.