PAUSE

Hold the phone, stop, wait a gosh darn minute…

I would like to take a moment, a moment to glow.  To bask in my day.

That is right, today is my day.  I claim ownership of April 28th every year because it is the day I was brought into the world.  It commemorates the day that the world was introduced to me, and I to it.  It is the day that I am allowed to selfishly celebrate each year as the day the planet was honored with my existence.

Okay, perhaps that is a little exaggerated, but you get the gist.

I turned 25 today.  I feel amazing.  I was engulfed in love today.  My friends and family seized the opportunity to lavish me with love.  That is why I love birthdays.  Every person is allowed, on their birthday, to be wholly selfish and surround themselves with adoring fans.  Its essential.  Its like a tidal wave of adoration — everyone recognizes the significance of turning a year older and honors you in any way they can think of, no matter how small.

I felt so overcome by all those little things today, that I cried from happiness.  Those are my favorite tears.  My birthday was not made any smaller by the fact that I had to spend most of it studying for a final tomorrow.  My birthday was splendid in simplicity.  My friends and family made an effort, and that is the best gift of all.

Numero 25 is starting off well.  Get excited people.

Phantasm

Reality is a perception.

Mull that one over.  If I think about it for too long I get a headache.  Lets see if we can’t hash this one out a little bit because I am a glutton for punishment.  Bring on the headache.

First of all, try thinking about all the different ways you use the term “reality” in everyday parlance.  There are even phrases like “Reality Check” or “you need a dose of reality” or “the reality of the situation…”  Now think about how every time someone has said one of those phrases to you (or every time you have said those phrases to someone else) they [you] have followed one of those phrases with their [your] own opinion of what that reality is!  No two people have precisely the same perception of one single event.  There is certainly such a thing as consensus — multiple people can agree to adopt a single perception — but it is still a form of perception.  So where does that leave “reality”?

Philosophy may attempt to solve this dilemma by categorizing reality as “something that exists independently of all other things and from which all other things derive.”

???

I posit that the phantasm is where a large portion of the population exerts its mental power of perception.  According to Platonic philosophy, a phantasm is “objective reality as perceived and distorted by the five senses.”  More simply a phantasm is a creation of the imagination.  This means that there is presumably an objective reality which as humans we are incapable of perceiving without placing a filter in front of it.  The filter is our imagination, built through experience and creativity, which then creates our own individual perception of “reality.”

I am not suggesting that we all live in a fantasy land and that there is nothing tangible to rest our weary minds on as concrete.  I am suggesting that we all rely on the phantasm — we need it in order to make sense of every day occurrences, of our interactions with others.  When you consider that communication is one of the biggest problems in any relationship, it makes more sense under the idea that we are trying to communicate through these filters.  Trying to get another person to see the world through your own filter, and vice versa, talk about mental gymnastics.  Luckily, we’re built to be able to empathize.

Yes, I can feel the headache coming on 🙂  This kind of discussion is also a bit of a rush for me, so I apologize if hardly any of it made sense.

Perhaps now you have a small window into the way I filter the world…

Surreal

Today, at 8:55 a.m. central time, I attended my last class.  The last time that I would attend a regularly scheduled lecture in which the possibility would arise that I would be called on and expected to know the answer to a question concerning the outcome of a case.  The last time that I will have carried a textbook into a classroom tabbed to the pages of the assigned reading, full of highlighting to what I hope were the most relevant passages.  Hopefully the last time a professor will make passive-aggressive remarks about just how much we don’t know yet, and alluding to just how much we will have to study for our final.

I am almost 25 (in a week), and I have been attending school for twenty of those twenty-five years.  That doesn’t include pre-school, I think just because it has the “pre” affixed to it, indicating that it is before school and so cannot count as school.  Anyway, twenty years of school…that is mind-boggling.  I do not remember much about life before school, since those memories are pretty far and few between anyway.  Most of my more concrete memories begin around the age of 5, with a few from age 4.  So really, I can’t remember what it is like to not be a student.  I have been a career student.  My life has always in a pivotal way revolved around my education.  It provided my day to day activities, including what I was to spend most of my free time doing (home work).  It was the mechanism through which I built friendships, and provided a foundation upon which I built my perspective of reality.

I am extremely thankful for the abundance of education I have received.  I would be lying though if I said I wasn’t scared about life after school.  Truthfully, I am well aware that in many respects my education has created a bubble that has insulated me from a lot of harsh realities.  I am privileged to be able to slowly integrate myself into the responsibilities of adult life.  That is not something I will ever take for granted.

Now, having finished my last class of my academic career, I feel as though I am standing at the edge of a cliff.  Not only am I on the edge, but I am also engulfed by clouds.  All I am equipped with is the knowledge that has been heaped into my brain for the last 20 years.  It is exhilarating, overwhelming, and surreal.  As steadily as I have climbed, I am now at the precipice.  There is nothing left to climb and I have simply to make the leap.  I am ready for my next adventure, for the next chapter.