Change of Mind: The Works of the Bard

Imagine descending into a swimming pool to find it is only 3 feet deep—shallow enough to comfortably stand with the water up to your waist. Yet, you feel quite cold. As you start to move toward the other end of the pool, the surface of the water slowly inches up toward you neck, and your toes grow less and less acquainted with the ground. Soon, however, the depth of the water is so much that even your tip-toeing ceases. You must now flail and kick in order to stay in place. You are forced to swim, and it is a little terrifying, but you find that you are enjoying yourself at the same time. And you are no longer cold.

This has basically been my relationship with William Shakespeare’s works… until last year.

In elementary and middle school, the works of the Bard were exactly that: chilling waters that I just did not want to jump into. Of course I had heard all about him—everyone had. He was a classic, and I went along with that. But, as much as it pains me to admit, I only agreed because I couldn’t refute. I mean, who could honestly understand this guy? I distinctly remember countless questions about his sonnets on standardized tests I took even as early as third grade and the utter perplexity that came with them. If there was actually something Shakespeare was trying to say in his writing, he was definitely doing a terrible job at expressing it, I thought. I would just end up guessing the answer and moving on.

His mazes of words flustered me to no end, because everything we were learning about grammar in school just didn’t seem to apply to him. Verbs became nouns, and nouns became verbs. And don’t even start on the adjectives! When it came time for the rite-of-passage of reading Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade, I found myself deeper in that maze than I had ever been. Thank God for the left-side-of-the-page-translations, I thought, because I certainly wouldn’t have been able to discern Benvolio’s role in the story without them.

It really wasn’t until my second run-through of Romeo and Juliet, this time in my freshman year of high school, that I thought Shakespeare actually might be up to something with his wild words. It was only then that I let go and started swimming.

We took one stanza in the play and read and read and read it over and over again like we were trying to unearth something which was stubbornly stuck in the ground. All of a sudden, realization would strike me and everything made sense. I remember my sense of astonishment when we explored Shakespeare’s use of the ideas “saints” and “prayer” when actually talking about hands and kissing.

This shift in my thinking after our painstaking analysis of Romeo and Juliet is almost tangible to me. Shakespeare’s words were no longer obstacles in my way… they were different colors on his palette which he used to paint pictures that I never had access to before. I began to notice the melody and emotions of his lines which normal, grade school grammar would never have allowed. And finally I could say I enjoyed reading the right sides of the pages more than the now-bland left sides.

Although there are still times when I have to reread one of Shakespeare’s lines at least ten times before I can make any sense of it, I now realize just how much that persistence can pay off. There is so much more to discover in the deep end.

360 Degrees: Anticipation

Cool beads of sweat on your upper lip. The anxious churning in the pit of your stomach. The heavy beat of your heart marking every second which gets you closer to that moment that you dread… or that moment which you can’t wait for. That moment that makes your stomach feel weightless and giddy just thinking about it. That moment which plants a smile firmly on your face no matter how hard you tug the sides of it down. But throughout all of this, no one can really truly say whether that moment will even arrive.

It is the sheer power of our anticipation which makes us feel those things. We feel an event before it comes and our whole body reacts. More often than not, we realize that our anticipations end up setting expectations, which the real moment never seems to live up to: The premiere of that hilarious new movie that you’ve been looking forward to for months… really wasn’t that funny. Or that math test that you lose sleep over for weeks… actually wasn’t that hard. Everyone knows what I’m talking about. So, what exactly is at play here?

Once we hear about something that may happen in the future, a seed is planted in our subconscious. Depending on how exactly we feel about the possibility of this event, we construct a specific and elaborate scenario of it in our mind. We then become immersed in that fabrication, even believing it to be real. It replays in our mind constantly and this is what makes our heart feel like lead or a feather: an overwhelming hypothesis.

Now, some people appreciate this phenomenon and others condemn it. One person said, “He who matures early lives in anticipation,” while another stated, “Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.” Is anticipating events really a part of maturing? I suppose in this sense, anticipation is equated with learning and gaining wisdom from past events in order to predict future ones. It could also mean being one step ahead of life and always being prepared. But, this interpretation is focusing more on the physical aspect of anticipation. What about the psychological aspect of it? I believe this is what the second interpretation was getting at. The thoughts of the future can preoccupy us so much that we don’t let the present moment soak in. And on top of that, those preoccupying thoughts have the potential to make us feel pretty miserable. But I know that, personally, looking forward to an exciting event has made for some of the happiest periods of my life. I even find myself seeking out events just so that I can enjoy the thrilling anticipation of it.

So, should we try to anticipate what is to come in our lives, or try to solely live in the moment? Does looking forward lead to a more alert and “mature” person, or a more worried and disappointed one? And I am especially curious about how our expectations of an event actually influence how we end up experiencing it. Maybe being thrown into every situation like a blind man into cold water, would unlock a whole new level of exhilaration in life that an anticipating person will never know.

But most importantly, is any of this really under our control? If all this is going on in our subconscious, is it even in reach? And if it is, how can we tame something that has so much power over our health and happiness?

An Inconvenient Truth: The Eye-Opening Experience of Death

We never know what we have until it’s gone. And even more devastating, we never seem to fully appreciate the lives of others until their death finally opens our eyes.

I became aware of this startling reality just this past week and it left an awful taste in my mouth. I became aware of it the moment that Steve Jobs, a man of a thousand legacies, passed away last Wednesday, October 5. Many things shocked me at that moment. For one, this man died at the mere age of 56, with almost half his life left unlived. A mind like his should not have an expiration date. But more shocking than that was the fact that I had known almost nothing about him a week and a half ago.

Of course I had known that he was the co-founder of the great Apple Inc. and that he was one of the people who had designed and developed the first successful personal computers all those years ago (or not so long ago). I had heard his name several times before, but only when it followed a mouthwatering description of a new Apple gadget or when my mother emailed me a copy of his Stanford University Commencement speech… when I was nine years old. So that is what I saw him as for all those years: a name; not a person. In a manner of speaking, I knew that this flower existed, but I had no clue how deep its roots reached or how far its seeds spread.

For example, I had no clue that Steve Jobs had in fact been put up for adoption after his birth parents were prohibited from marrying, or that he was the co-founder and former chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios. And I still cannot fully believe that he was Buddhist. My utter ignorance bothers me to no end.

Because of it, the genius behind the iPod never had a face or a story. If I had just understood him a little better, maybe when I was shuffling through my playlists, I could have realized that I was also peeking into one of the most brilliant minds on Earth. Or maybe I could have followed his brave struggle with cancer and meaningfully connected it to my life at that time. But all this came too late.

Why? Why does realization always have to hit us after the fact? Perhaps it takes a concrete publication of a person’s life, like the whole Bloomberg Businessweek edition dedicated solely to the story of Steve Jobs which came out the day after he died, for us to sit down and say with certainty, “Yes, he was a good man.” Perhaps we cannot fully appreciate what all someone has done while they are still alive because, heck, they’re still alive… they still have time to screw everything up.

Now, I don’t know whether it is the worst thing that I never knew much about Steve Jobs until now. I don’t know if it is really reasonable and attainable to immerse ourselves in everyone else while they are still alive. But, I do know that death should not be our wake-up call. We should always try to appreciate the mind and stories of all those around us, no matter what’s going on in ours. I personally owe it to Steve Jobs to do that much.