Thinking Differently

     It seems so logical. It makes so much sense. It's so obviously clear. But if that's the case, why is there disagreement? Why does someone think it's wrong? Why does someone else have a different answer, a different reason or not even understand what it is that you're talking about? Something I've been realizing more and more lately is that people's minds work differently and we think in different ways. This is something that's incredibly difficult to overcome though, at least in my opinion, because it can leave us at somewhat of a stalemate with another person. We hit a wall that can't really be overcome because we simply cannot get ourselves to think in the same way the other person does, so we can't move forward. We see the results of this all the time in our personal lives, in our political system, in our workplaces, and really wherever we go.

      Now, I realize I'm not alone in having discovered this. The best response we can often come up with is compromise. Without that, we're left either continuously running into the wall or we give up and abandon the whole situation. But what if it's something that can't be compromised? What if it's a fact that can't change because it simply is what it is? If they don't want to see the truth in front of them, you're pretty much left helpless. But what if that's not ok? What if you care too much for that to be acceptable? You're still stuck unable to overcome it, at least on your own, because you're simply not thinking the same way they are. I think this is one of the harshest realities I keep having to face.

     It's amazing how different people are in terms of how they act, what they prioritize, and how they choose to spend their time. There are some things that I believe to be so basic that others don't even seem to care about. Living in an apartment full of other guys, this becomes readily apparent. Even among roommates, trying to get the other to understand your thought process is always a challenge. Something you may see as ignoring a responsibility, they may not even realize is an issue

     I think the hardest thing is that we have to keep going regardless of whether others see what we do or not. In a way it's almost like we have to ignore it and move on. But it still sits there like an elephant in the room, being unmovable and something all parties involved know is there. Then again, this is what creates the excitement, innovation, and overall world we have today. Without people thinking differently, we wouldn't have a need for all of the majors there are in college, for example. We wouldn't have the variety of cultures, technologies, and societies that we do. The world we live in is built on the fact that different people act and think in different ways.

     Politics is a huge area of conflict for this reason. We each have our opinions, things we support, things we're against, and some kind of ideology we follow. We choose who we want to represent us based on these things and when someone else isn't supporting or against the same things that we are, problems arise. How is it they don't see how big of an issue environmental protection is, for example. Don't they see how beneficial it would be to cut certain areas and give more funding towards others? Are they aiming for the long term or just the here and now? What are they thinking?

    Another classic area for this is the different thought processes between men and women. A guy make think something is funny or looks great while the lady next to him thinks the same thing is horrible. A woman may think that spending the day in the mall is great while a man can't wait to find the exit. None of this is meant to label guys and girls under the normal stereotypes though, because a guy could enjoy being in a mall while a girl thinks it's a bore just the same. So even within that, our thoughts about a norm or the way one gender thinks versus the other could be totally flipped at any given moment. Looking at a successful marriage is probably the best place to see this occurring and I would venture to say that most successful marriages are successful because the man and woman realize that they do think differently but they're willing to work together to overcome it and live with it.

     The biggest area of contention that I keep facing with this though is with religion. I am a Christian, but the only thing I know for certain is the very core meaning that God exists, that Christ existed and came to die and save us from our sins. Beyond that everyone seems to have their own opinion and thoughts regarding beliefs, and I'm talking about within Christianity itself. Some seem to think that things such as a snow storm happening or a the winning of a sporting event or the loss of a job are because God made it happen. To me, I can see that but more in the sense of God sustains existence which allows cold fronts to occur and cause snow storms, people to create game plans and train in order to win games, and the economy is poor which has led to cuts needing to be made and executives deciding that's the best way to do it as a part of their business strategy. But we're both talking about the same God and you can't have and not have direct intervention at the same time, so how is that possible? Things get even wilder if you branch outside of Christianity and see that there are so many people believing so many different things, or even lacking beliefs. The problem is that we can't all be right, it's just not possible. God either exists or He doesn't. Christ either came and died to save us from our sins or the whole thing is utter nonsense. Christ is either the one way or He's not. You can't have it both ways, there is no middle ground here and yet some people think there is. We keep going through our daily lives with people all around us thinking totally different things and having totally different beliefs, knowing that someone has to be wrong. But the real question is, who? And if we're right when the others are wrong, how is that not our top pursuit, especially when it comes to this big of an issue?

     The thing is, we live our lives knowing that others think and act differently than us, but we don't really acknowledge it. There's a wall staring us in the face in so many situations but we can't overcome it, so we try to go around it. It ultimately leads to this point of acceptance, realizing that we're all different people that think in different ways. You can have all the facts and truth you want but if someone isn't willing to accept it, what is it worth? Our ways of thinking are always being challenged and changed. For me it's wild to think that my thoughts right now regarding my future will be totally different when I actually get wherever I'm going. Right now they seem so real and they seem to matter, yet in a short time they will seem like nonsense. Situations I was in just a short time ago I could have never thought about the possibility of leading to where they have. Most of the time this happens because someone else wasn't thinking the same way you were and this had an impact on you. So how do we reconcile this? How do we live our lives having something we know to be true when so many others don't think so? I guess overall it's a part of life, something that will never change. But that doesn't do much in terms of settling the conflict, we just have to not think about it, accept it, or drive ourselves nuts trying to resolve it. For now, I leave you with a challenge. When you face someone who thinks, says, or does something that you know isn't right, just remember that they may not be wrong, they're just thinking differently.

Time and Timing

     Our lives are made up of the time we have and how we use it. There are countless ways we can spend the time we have each day, each week, each month, and each year. Everyone seems to spend it differently and we all seem to have separate paths and separate goals that guide how we use our time. Time is something we try to manage and control, all while attempting to get the most out of each day in whatever way we see fit. The funny thing about that is, we don't know exactly how much time we even have to spend in our lives. As much as we may try to control how and where we spend our time, it never ceases to amaze me how ineffective this can seem to be. I think a big part of it is that we each are trying to control our own schedules and plan our own days, but then we go out into reality and realize we aren't in a vacuum. As soon as we interact with someone else, things change and our carefully planned schedules can go wildly out of control. The problem is that we can't fully control all of the variables and when our time hits someone else's, things change. And yet, often times we still seem to act as those we can plan out our days exactly as we want them to be.

     But, life is made up of moments where things don't go as planned and we have something happen that we never could have expected. Along those same lines lies the notion of timing. It's been said that timing is everything and that things happen because someone was in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. Most of the time, we can't make good timing happen. Being in that place at that time often relies on things beyond our control. This is something that has become more apparent in my life recently and I'm constantly reflecting on it. I agonizingly analyze events, trying to think of ways I could have spent time differently or how I could have tried to create better timing. The thing is, I don't know how things might have turned out had I spent my time differently. We can all speculate, but we can never know for sure.

     A recent example of this in my life would be just recently when I was at work speaking with my supervisor about the task I was being assigned. A young lady walked up and started talking with my supervisor about how she was getting used to campus and her roommates since she's a transfer student so everything was new to her at UMD. She talked about how she was trying to find a good group or club to get involved with and that she didn't really like her roommates because they were "normal" college kids, meaning they like to go to wild parties and get drunk on the weekends. The whole time I'm listening to her talk, I can't help but feeling a sense of excitement building because I've heard that story and sense of searching for something different before. My supervisor turns to me and asks if I know of any good groups here on campus and I smiled and told her that I knew of just the community she should get involved with, namely The Navigators. I explained to the young lady that this group was pretty special, one that can give you an amazing community of friends, carry you through any situation, and change your life if you let it. She seemed pretty excited herself by the idea so I invited her to our weekly family dinner event happening that evening so that she could get plugged in. After we exchanged contact information and she headed on her way, I sat there for several minutes stunned by what had just occurred. I remembered so clearly how I felt that same way when I was coming in to college here at UMD as many have and I realized how big of an impact this one group has had on me over the years. In terms of timing, how could I have ever known that this meeting would have happened? If she had arrived half an hour before, I would have still been in class and she wouldn't have had the chance to have me tell her about this amazing group and the life changing experience that it offers. If I hadn't been in contact with my supervisor over the winter break regarding a different matter, would she have ever offered me the part time job that I now have that led to this encounter? If I hadn't been in the right place to be invited by a professor to be a part of the program that I am now in that led to the need to contact my now supervisor regarding that other matter, would any of this have happened? Since that first meeting, the young lady has joined The Navs, attended our major Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Conference, and made several new friends that I believe will give her an amazing college experience, as they have for me. But again, would any of this have happened if the original timing wasn't right and I wasn't in the right place at the right time to tip over the first domino? We may never know and I don't think we can. The important thing is that it did happen and a whole new unforeseen path can be made because of it.

     Something else that has come up recently along the same lines is the concept of things taking a long time versus a short time to accomplish or change. When I started my senior year this past fall, I had no idea of what I wanted to be doing after graduation in terms of starting my career. I could understand that concept that I will need a job and that the ideal is to find something that I will enjoy doing, but I didn't know what that meant for me in terms of what I should be going after. It felt like it should be something that I could "get done", meaning that I should be able to spend an afternoon exploring career paths that come out of the two majors that I have, and that by the end of the day I should know what I want to do. It turned out though that this wasn't the case and it took a mix of going through interviews, taking more classes, and really exploring the possibilities to get a good notion of what I may enjoy doing, at least as a starter point. I had to be told over and over by people such as my father that these thing don't happen overnight and that they take time. The time that I took to go through all that I did has given me a much clearer focus as to what I'm aiming for. Could or should it have taken a longer or shorter time to reach the point where I'm now at? I could see the result that I wanted and felt like it shouldn't take any time at all, but it has taken time and that's what has caused me to grow. Again though, I may have never discovered my current interests had the timing not been right for me to have spoken with a recent graduate from my same major, who recommended I take a class in the area that I'm now interested in. If the timing hadn't been right for me to have had the internship experience that I had this past summer, I may never have found out more about what I do and don't enjoy doing. Heck, if the timing hadn't been right for me to have the opportunity to run my produce business as I did, I may have never selected the majors that I'm about to graduate with a degree in. The possibilities and paths to follow all of the timing chain backwards through my life are limitless.

     Time is such a strange concept, one we can't fully understand and wrap our minds around. No matter what, there are so many ways to spend your time that you can never do everything, so choices must be made. It's funny how time seems to fly by when we're having fun and yet it drags on when we can't wait for something to be over or for something to happen. Think about the way you're spending your time today. Are you spending it in the most productive way? Who is to say what the most productive way is? Does it even matter? If you are spending your time unwisely according to someone else's standards or ideas, does that affect you? Why or why not? If you "waste" your time doing something seemingly trivial and meaningless, is that really a bad thing? What if it turns into something that somehow allows you to follow your dreams and feel fulfilled in life? If you had spent more time focusing on something or trying to be better at some task or had spent more time with that one person, would the outcome have been different? .

     But timing is everything, right? I believe that's a really odd and difficult concept because if it were really everything then why aren't we spending all of our time focusing on how to make our timing perfect? Or who knows, maybe we are and we just don't realize it. Is it even possible to make our timing perfect? Sure, we can try to put the odds in our favor by being in certain places at certain times, but do we actually think that that's what makes good timing happen? Timing is the "everything" that we can't control or predict. We make plans and schedule how we're going to spend our time, and then God laughs and throws us way off course. But who knows, maybe it's all for the better that timing in this regard is a great unknown. It's what's led to the lives that we now lead and has even lead to you reading this blog post because your timing was right to see it go by in your online ventures. I guess overall I would say that time really isn't a finite resource and it can lead to changes we never could have imagined, whether that be over the course of an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime. Time is a valuable resource though, one that you should spend wisely, in whatever way that may look like for you. But even if you don't, don't worry because you can never know what will come next as a result of how you spent your time. For now, I leave you with the thanks for taking the time to read this post and consider how you may relate. Remember, this is all just a thought.

Human Fallacy

     To say that we as humans act in a logical manner is, more often than not, totally untrue. It's amazing how many times I see, in other's lives as well as my own, instances where the right thing to do or the correct action is not the one we take. Over and over in my own life, I have times where I can see what I need to do, understand why I need to do it, see what the outcome will be if I don't do it, and yet I don't actually do that thing that I need to do. I've come to the conclusion that our actions are ones that we perform with the influence of a mix of factors. Doing something beneficial may look good on paper and may make sense, but in reality we need that reason along with a will, the right setting and a sense of motivation to follow through. The most ironic part of all this that I find is that we all realize this oddity in our human nature yet we're powerless to change it.

     There are many ways in which we may try to change the way we do something or change how we go about getting things done, such as creating to do lists or gaining advice on how to do something better. In the end though, all of human history shows the limits of our efforts. The other strange thing is that something that may make sense and seem like the right thing to do to us may not seem like that to someone else. Try as we may, we can never fully understand what someone else is thinking, regardless of how well we think we know them. I know for me personally as an introvert, I spend a lot of time observing, analyzing, and playing through scenarios in my head about how an action will play out or how a conversation with someone may go.  There are times I feel like I'm Sherlock Holmes in Game of Shadows. It never ceases to amaze me though how often these scenarios don't happen as I expected. On the other side of this, it seems as though we can never quite fully make someone else see just how it is we feel or what it is we're thinking. I keep wanting to somehow convey my thoughts and feelings into someone else's head like it's something I could load on a flash drive and transfer to them, but I keep hitting the wall of reality.

     This whole topic of actions not always following logic is something that has come up a lot for me in recent months, and I guess its always been there, just not as prominent in my thoughts. Oddly enough, the church service I went to this past Sunday was on this topic, talking about Romans 7:14-25 and how we do the things we know we don't want to do. This worked out well because I was thinking of this passage just the night before. On a quick side note and as a preview, that phenomena of me seeing things coming before they happen will be discussed in my next post. Anyway, the man giving the message that morning talked about how there are a lot of things in our lives where we just keep trying to do what we know we need to, but we fail repeatedly. This was strange for me sitting there in a room full of people mostly older than me all seeming to agree with him because I realized that this is a natural occurrence that's not likely to end anytime soon in my life. The main point of his message was that we are so lucky to be covered by God's grace, because it just keeps going regardless of how many times we act as Paul describes in the passage. Paul's writing about this clearly shows that this is nothing new but it's something that we must live with and in a sense can rest easy with because we know we're not alone. For me, I'm having to learn more and more that change, along with a lot of other things, can be a slow process. Changing habits, finding motivation, and shifting the way we live doesn't always happen quite as quickly as our fast paced society would like it to. Often we can see the results we want but when they don't happen instantly or sometimes even at all, we're left wondering what happened. This can easily be related to the concept of New Year's resolutions and how it seems like every year people make them and yet every year people joke about how they've failed to fully realize them.

     Overall, I guess it's like Paul says in Romans 7:23, "there is another power within me that is at war with my mind." We keep at it, whatever it may be, because we have a drive to succeed and a guilt if we do nothing. The brokenness of humanity, including my own, will continue to baffle me as long as I live, in all of the forms it comes in. For me, I've discovered that writing things down and checking things off makes me feel accomplished and makes me more successful, although again this is something that I fail to always do even though I know the benefits that will come from it. Really though, it seems as though more often than not we set up the logical course of action, just to watch it fall apart due to our human fallacy and this crazy thing called life.

All is Quiet on New Year's Day

My favorite song of 2012, One Thousand Suns. Feel free to listen as you read. 

I've discovered I have a deep connection to trance music as it always tells an incredible story if you're willing to hear it.  

     Well, here we are at the start of another year. Unlike my previous new years notes, I decided to make this post the start of a blog that I've been wanting to make for a long time. As usual, reflecting on a year gone by brings up a lot of memories, questions, thoughts, uncertainties, and somewhat of a sense of peace. One thing I discovered this past year about myself is that I love endings or closings, really coming full circle. Whether it be watching a season finale of a show, reading the last few pages of a book, or wrapping up a good conversation, I never seem to be fully satisfied until I can somehow mentally check something off of a list. 

     This past year was full of these kinds of events which really carried me from some of my highest highs to some of my lowest lows. It seems as though I will always have to be reminded that the only real constant is change and 2012 was certainly full of it. The year started off wild as usual as I decided to venture out on my own farther than I'd ever been before, out to Toledo, Ohio where I spent several days hanging out with my friend Leon, aka Jaguar, that I know exclusively through the internet. I got to explore the whole area, meet some new people, and have my first experience at a shooting range. Jaguar is originally from Russia and I got to meet the rest of his family one night, where I got to sit in a room full of people while we all had dinner and I had no idea what anyone was saying! A few days later I worked my way back towards home, deciding to weave my way through the West Virginia mountains to make a day trip of visiting my aunt and uncle. Eventually I made my way back to Maryland and UMD where I kicked off a wild semester. 

     The spring semester was one of the greatest times of my college career. I had the most memorable and incredible adventures with my best friends all while working through some difficult classes, having my first internship, and applying and interviewing for a summer internship. I went with the rest of the Navs up to Chester, PA where we got to spend about a week working in Fredrick Douglass Christian School on a variety of different projects. I learned that people come from a wide variety of backgrounds and they can often have different ways of expressing their belief in Christ, but that doesn't make it wrong. After the trip, I headed home to finish off the break and had my first drink with my dad as I turned 21. The rest of the semester seemed to fly by as I headed towards the summer. The big 100 year anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic came, something I had been looking forward to since I was much younger when I used to study all about the Titanic. I set myself up for an internship opportunity for the summer and bought my first car, a 2001 Honda Accord. Overall, my junior year was a crazy ride but it wrapped up well.

     The summer came and for the first time in a decade, I wasn't working at the produce stand. I headed up to Bethlehem, PA for a summer internship in a wholesale grocery warehouse where I got to learn about just how much it takes to fill the stores with everything that we can often take for granted. I got to spend the summer living in a guest room with a great guy, Rich, who was happy to show me around the area and get me plugged in to his church.  I also made a friend who took me on some adventures around town, including Musikfest. I certainly had quite the stories to bounce off everyone as I had the experience of doing things such as spending five weeks on night shift where my work day started at 10 pm and was almost over when the sun rose. It was certainly a rough environment for me but I made it through and learned a lot because of it. I decided to take a long weekend that I had and head up to Schenectady, NY to visit Tyler and see where he grew up. I eventually finished up with my internship and headed home to enjoy a week off before heading back to UMD to start my senior year. 

     The fall semester started off with a bang as I was caught off guard by career fairs that started the second week. That was just a sign of things to come as I applied for so many opportunities that during one week I had five interviews. I ventured up with Matt and Alyssa to visit my grandmother in Erie, PA which was something we hadn't done in many years. In our apartment, I got used to living with a few new guys but Tyler and I started into our third year of being roomies. I got baptized through the church I go to at UMD, Maryland Christian Fellowship, which signified turning over a new leaf for me. Through my classes and interviews, I went even further than I had ever gone before, spending a few days in Anaheim, CA one week and a day in Keene, NH the next. This fall semester was one that really stretched me to my limits in a lot of ways and just kind of slowly rolled towards the winter break, leaving me uncertain of a lot of things but constantly exploring. 

     So, now we're here at my final winter break of college. So far I've had a good Christmas and I've finally started to pack up my old room, which is a big deal for me. But, I've still got three weeks left of break and I'm gonna enjoy them.

     Well, that's about it, my 2012 in review. But now we're at the start of a whole new year, one that will certainly hold a lot of surprises and big changes. My two majors that I will be graduating with a degree in are Supply Chain Management and Marketing, with my ambitions aimed more towards the first of the two. I've got one semester left at UMD and then...well I'm still not sure of what then, but I'm working on it. This past year, once again, some things and some friendships changed more than I ever imagined they would. People moved, got married, started new jobs, graduated, and so on and so forth. It's funny because I seem to say the same thing every year but it always feels like something is different each time around. I've never been a big fan of change but it seems that I don't have much choice in the matter. These reviews always make me take a step back and see the story that's always being written. It seems that we get caught up so much in the day to day nature of our lives that it can be hard to realize just how one thing impacts another. 
     
     One thing that I've definitely tried to learn and wrap my mind around is that we pretty much always have a choice, regardless of whether we realize it or not and regardless of the subject matter that we're making the choice about. I've learned that I'm someone who is highly analytical and because of this I can never seem to fully settle on a choice and be fully satisfied. Satisfaction itself seems to be a never ending quest and life is a mystery filled with unknowns that we can never solve. The main thing I keep facing is that, barring any catastrophic events such as Mayan doomsdays that never seem to actually happen, the world keeps turning and time keeps ticking along with us powerless to stop it. But I guess, even if we could, I'm not sure we would want to because then we couldn't reflect on time gone by as I am doing here. Something else I've realized this past year is that logic is not a motivator and just because reason shows us what may or may not occur, it doesn't mean that we're actually going to do the reasonable thing. Really, humanity is this strangely broken thing that doesn't have that concrete ending or obtainable set foreseeable result of being fixed or completed that I described back at the start as something I seem to always desire. People come and go, events happen, life goes on, and the amount of actual control that we have is astoundingly small. Everyone always seems to have their input, their advice, their ideas of what should happen but it comes down to how we act on all of this. One of my favorite quotes is "Man Plans, God Laughs" which is funny because it relates to my key "life" verse, if you will, of Jeremiah 29:11 which states "For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope." These are both things I've looked to quite often as 2012 has drawn to a close and I look back and see how many of my plans did not go as planned. We can't ever fully know a situation or fully know another person and every part of life requires faith of some kind, even if we don't realize it. Along with that, I've discovered that a lot of what we do and how we live comes down to not whether or not something is actually true or not, but whether we actually believe its true or not. Regardless of what our beliefs may be, a fact is by definition true, we just can't ever fully know what all of the facts are. This is something that I feel I will wrestle with for a long time.

     

     So here we are at the beginning of a whole new adventure called 2013. Although we may not know entirely where we're going as individuals, as a nation, and as a world, I'm pretty sure we'll be back again this time next year reflecting once again. I know I plan on diving right in, being hopeful about the changes that will come and knowing that some things never change. I want to thank everyone who played a part in my life in 2012, you certainly helped make it a wild ride. Hopefully I've left a positive impression on you all and if not, maybe even that's something that can change this new year. Now comes my favorite part though, that thing that I tried to describe at the outset of this message, the ending that ties it all together as a complete package. Although, I've learned that even the things that I think that I've brought to a close never really end. But for now, here's to 2013 and whatever it may bring. Let's make it another year to remember.

-Adam