Life's Messages

I am not a religious fanatic. To be perfectly honest, I'm not really religious at all. I'm reluctant to say that however, because it implies that I'm not spiritual, which I am. One of the things about which I am spiritual is that I believe every so often, life's forces come together to try and tell us things. I sometimes am fortunate enough to see certain connections which I interpret, however absurdly, as life's little encouragements.

Thist past week for me has been one such week. I have been consistently reminded of another of my semi-spiritual beliefs, which is in the electric chain of humanity. But I must start from the beginning. Something must be changed, and it is important to understand the previous state before one can understand the significance of the change. Therefore, let me begin in the past.

Over the course of the last year, I have been turning increasingly inwards. I have limited myself socially, partly due to fear, partly due to my unreasonably high expectations of others, and partly due to my completely unjustified self-love. In having my crusade for intellectualism serve as my only purpose in life, I lost sight of too much. Impatient, withdrawn, eltist, and dedicated only to intellectualism. Yet the last week has reaffirmed changes I had already sensed beginning in myself.

On Sunday, I attended the informal memorial service for Nate Kirkland. I did not know Nate well, but I felt it appropriate to go, especially as a sign of support for so many of my friends who did know Nate well. What I heard was inspirational. Friend after friend got up and talked about how Nate loved everyone, and how he engaged everyone. He was the definition of a humanitarian. Always smiling, always interacting with everyone.

On Tuesday, I read an article by William McNeill, the Canadian historian in which he advocated for global history on the grounds that it was the historian's duty to unify mankind if possible. His argument - that telling the histories of individual countries and regions serves to divide the world, and that historians should additionally emphasize the commonalities present among all mankind.

And today:

First I had lunch with a friend of mine who argued more effectively than I had imagined that everyone's opinions are equally valuable if your goal is to understand humanity. A somewhat remarkable argument, that if I had chosen my cynnical best could most likely have argued against, but I had already made a conscious decision to return to a more humanitarian Alex, and so I found myself accepting this argument (I gladly await the criticisms of my logically oriented philosophical colleagues). That each person offers valuable insight into his/her own way of thinking is totological. Obviously, one could offer the contextualized argument suggesting that each interaction produces more or less advancement in knowledge. I thought of that for a while, and it makes sense, but I am looking at a larger picture, and in my larger picture, equality is essential.

Secondly, I read Ralph Waldo Emerson's An American Scholar, in which he explicitly references the concept I would call the electric chain of humanity, emphasizing, like McNeill, the commonalities present in man. His main point, that each scholar should work to be a Thinking Man because in doing so he enhances Man, the collective, follows along a similar line.

Finally, tonight, I watched one of my five favorites movies (coincidentally Robert Redford had something to do with three of them), Diarios de Motocicleta. I had the pleasure of seeing this movie in the fall of 2007. Watching it again a year and a half later, I still remembered so much of it. I have thought of this movie almost weekly in that time period. The story of Che Guevara's development into the man he became is a fascinating one, and the imagery in the movie is out of this world. Guevara's goal of unifying the people's of Latin America is congruous to these other indications I’ve had over the past week.

The idea that man’s humanity is more important than his country or his ethnicity has been coming up again and again. Yet it is four words from Guevara’s diary said in a voiceover at the end which I find to be the most prescient to this column: “Ya no soy yo.” I’m not me anymore. I hope that this is the case for me. I hope I have been able to transcend my impatience in my solitary question for intellectual elitism. I love being an intellectual, but I have overlooked the human component to my education for too long.

To my friends here, I offer my apologies for being so cold for so long. To my friends from home, your overly idealistically humanitarian colleague has returned. Ya no soy yo.