Be Out of Breath from Living

Life is not easy.  At least not for me.  Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I lived the carefully planned happily ever after life that is so redundant in modern day literature.  I guess it's a sign that society has grown to desire a life of carefully planned and carried out experiences that all lead up to the grand finale in the rest home when your family gathers around you to express their deepest regrets that your spirit is going on temporary leave.  I say that predictability is lame.  I would much rather live an adventurous life than the kind found on the TV screen.  I do not mind taking a few risks and suffering a few set back if that is what it takes to live out loud.  I want to go to bed every night out of breath from just being alive.

A few months ago, a seminary teacher said something to my class that woke me up.  He said,"Too many high school students(or people in general) expect to get something for nothing."  It was just a month or two before the AP Calculus test, and I was feeling victimized.  I was sure that the world was out to get me.  Sir Isaac Newton had been planning my demise all along.  After all, I was having to sacrifice so much.  I thought sacrifices made you a victim.  When my teacher said that I realized that that was my problem exactly.  I felt entitled to pass.  I changed my attitude about everything that day, and in doing so, I changed my altitude.  When I face a challenge, I no longer feel the apathy that comes with a feeling of expectancy.  My adrenaline rushes through my veins, and I suddenly feel like I am ready to climb any mountain to overcome the obstacle.

 

I took the idea of living out of breath and ready to fight for anything I valued with me when I began my senior year of high school.  I signed up for ballroom dancing, the class I had vowed never to take because of the fact that I am 72 inches tall and not the most coordinated of human beings.  I am pretty sure that I have a disadvantage.  The signal from my brain to my toes probably takes an average of two seconds longer in me than in shorter people.  I was also more than slightly concerned that the guys in that class would be ridiculously shorter than me and that all in all I would feel like an idiot.  Well, I took a deep breath and signed up for the class; to this day, I do not know how the voices in my head talked me into it.  I love it.  It takes every ounce of confidence I can muster each time I walk into the dance room, but I do not regret my decision for a minute.  When I leave that class, I always hope that someone sees me leaving that class and thinks, "Is that Sarah leaving ballroom?  I never thought she'd take that class."

 

I am obviously not the only person in history to adopt a life of constant asthma symptoms and love it.  I look at most of the great people of history and think, "If little old me is finding her life exciting, they must have been hysterical."  Look at the great writers like Thoreau, or O'Connor, or Bronte.  They did not walk paths paved with gold, but they came away with a whole sack-full of it in the end.  At least, I think that being an acclaimed author and philosopher after you have been dead and gone for years is pretty cool.

I hope that I never live a boring life.  I would rather wake up dreading a day or two every once in a while if it means that something meaningful happens to me every moment of my life.  If valuable, adventurous, risk-requiring moments are all crumbs from the chocolate cake that is life, I plan to have an excruciating stomach ache by the time I am excused from the table.

I am issuing a challenge to anyone who reads this post.  You obviously have an impressive amount of willpower and endurance because you got through the entire entry, so now go out and live.  Live the life you want when it's possible, but more importantly, live the life you will gain the most from.  Take the paths with fewer footprints.  You may just be a drop in the bucket, but if you get yourself up to speed, you could make a pretty valuable splash.

Jane Eyre Doused the Flair of Vampires

Last Summer, I, like millions of other females around the country, fell in love with a vampire named Edward Cullen.  I stayed up until all hours of the night squealing and giggling as this modern Dracula swooped into Bella Swan's life and showed off his vampire strength and amazing looks.  I read New Moon in a record twelve hours and Eclipse in not much longer.  The Twilight Series quickly shot up to the top of my list of favorite books.  In June of this year, I anxiously pre-ordered Breaking Dawn began a long wait for August to come and bring the latest installment of the vampire story.  I made one rule for myself.  I would have to finish my Summer reading assignment before losing myself in the new book.  So I began Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and in so doing, ended my love affair with vampires.

Jane Eyre was a new kind of reading for me.  It required much more patience than the vampire books.  The plot was more subtle and hidden between paragraphs and pages of description.  At first, I found the book tedious and wondered how Bronte had managed to continue writing it without becoming distracted.  It was not until I reached page 400 that I realized I had fallen in love with the language, the words, the carefully constructed sentences.  Suddenly, It did not matter what Bronte was describing; I just enjoyed immersing myself in it.  I had been baptized by the amazing literature and come out a new reader.

There was another handicap when I first began Jane Eyre that I expected to doom the book to the bottom of my reading list, and it was the hero.  Edward Fairfax Rochester seemed to be as different from my Edward Cullen as it was possible to be.  He was described when Jane first set eyes on him as old and ugly; furthermore, he was not kind and protective like my Edward.  He was snide and crafty.  I did not understand how a book with such a disappointing main character could sell a single copy.  Then Bronte pulled another surprise on me.  She proceeded to transform my view of Rochester before my eyes with his words and actions.  What's more, he was not flat and perfectly understandable like Edward Cullen.  He had depth that I had never expected.  He was the kind of character I could believe actually existed.  Gradually, I turned my literary affections from the seventeen-year-old vampire ever squished between two covers to a thirty-eight-year-old vulcan.

The Twilight Series had also been a pleasure to read, but I had never quoted it.  I had never discovered a single sentence that was especially witty or that applied to any aspect of my life.  It was just a simple, predictable, page turner.  As I read Jane Eyre, I discovered a new genre of book.  It was not a page turner.  It was a page stopper.  There were phrases, sentences, paragraphs that were worth marking, remembering, and quoting.  I found myself applying words that had been written over a century ago to my life in the twenty-first century.  It was crazy.

I finally reached the end of Jane Eyre and grabbed the copy of Breaking Dawn and prepared to spend the night reintroducing myself to my beloved Edward Cullen.  I got through a grand total of fifteen pages before I had to give up.  I could not stand it.  There was no depth or language.  Where were the paragraphs of description?  And that Edward Cullen was so shallow and disgustingly good looking.  I just could not force myself through it.  Over the past month I have been forcing myself through it with the inertia that was once required to get through an assigned novel from school.  I am almost through it now.  I am going to force myself to finish it before I can read a book of substance like the next book we are reading for class, 1984.  Or maybe some more nineteenth century literature like a little Jane Austen or Dickens. I never could have imagined writing this last month, but what else can I say, Jane Eyre ruined Breaking Dawn.