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Mystrunner
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Name: Matthew
State: Illinois
Metro: Bloomington-Normal
Birthday: 6/30/1984
Gender: Male
Interests: Hard to pin them all down, but some effort must be made.
I like books. Love 'em. I'm practically a bibliophile. I prefer a good work of fiction, but occasionally nonfiction can take hold of me, specifically Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" and anything related to ICBMs. Humour in literature is a thing of great beauty.
I like anime. Don't take this to mean that I'm an irredeemable otaku. I enjoy anything with a good plot, character development, and a good score. Anime usually has all three, thus my love of it.
I like music. Particularly classical music, jazz, swing, bebop, and quite a bit else, actually. I have moral objections to rap and pop, unless they're in some language other than English, in which case they fall under the "Comedy" category.
I like the martial arts. I'm somewhat good at self defence, insomuch as that I have a good deal more confidence than I did, say, three years ago.
Oh, I'm a Christian. This should speak a lot about me. Perhaps more than the previous.
Occupation: Operations
Industry: Other
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  Mystrunner
MSN: Mystrunner_h2g2@hotmail.com
Member Since:
2/14/2006
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| Faith is an interesting thing. It spurs some people to passionate
speech, others to fervored debate, and more still to eye-rolling and
general discouragement. Faith is a belief in something, regardless of
evidence, for, against, or absence of. Nevertheless, it's something
that we all have, no matter what our beliefs are. Some people have
faith in God. Some people have faith that there is no such thing as the spirit, as God, or any of that.
That's
the first thing that people think of when it comes to faith. There are
many more ways it can be applied. I have faith that if I study hard, I
will get good grades, for example. This has been proven true fairly
often, but there are occasions when I am proven wrong; either, I don't
work at all and do well or I work quite a bit, and do horribly. Despite
this evidence, I still believe that hard work will result in good
grades. I have faith that my computer will do its equations correctly,
although I have no idea of how a computer reads binary or even how the
OS works. But I'm sure it's doing its job right.
Faith goes
deeper than that in the human heart. We believe in things like justice,
like duty, like loyalty between friends. We see every day evidence that
man is horrible. We see genocide, we see war, but worse than both, we
see the quiet indifference of those who could stop it. We see families
torn apart by infidelity.
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There
had been times, over the past millennium, when [Crowley the demon had]
felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well
give up right now, we may as well shut down Hell and move up here,
there's nothing we can do to them [humans] that they don't do
themselves and they do things we've never even thought of, often
involving electrodes.
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There's
overwhelming evidence that your average person shouldn't be trusted.
Period. Yet we have faith in the inherent goodness of people, we
believe that there is right and wrong, that justice does happen.
We need faith, as much as we need air. It doesn't matter who you are or what you believe; faith gives us hope.
~ Matt | | |
| An interesting quote:
-------------
"I wish to ask you a question," said the golem.
"Yes?"
"I smashed the treadmill but the workers repaired it. Why? And I let the animals go, but they just milled around stupidly. Some of them even went back to the slaughter pens. Why?"
"Welcome to the world, Constable Dorfl."
"Is it frightening to be free?"
"You said it."
"You say to people, 'Throw off your chains' and they make new chains for themselves?"
"Seems to be a major human activity, yes."
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Thinking back on the feeling of "how the heck did I get here?"... this may go a small way to explaining that feeling. It truly is frightening to be free. True, it is a wonderful thing, but so is being controlled, in a sense. To just lean back and let the natural progression of things take over, to let someone else decide what you need to be doing... it's been the course of my life so far. Home life, College, these are spent without making any truly ground-breaking decisions. You always have some guiding point to aim at, some ultimate goal to obtain, be it a job, or a diploma.
Once you're beyond these things, it's up to you to make your own goals. It's up to you to figure out what you need to do, and figure out how you should do it. We go out of our way to avoid this, sometimes. We attempt to surround ourselves with our youth, and look for any way to prevent the inevitable onslaught of maturity. Can we really avoid it? No. We can't. Inevitably, we must be responsible for our own selves. Can we prepare for it? That, we can do.
~ Matt
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| As I had noted before, the fourth fear is the fear of solitude, of being forgotten, abandoned and alone. This is something that we all dread, possibly more than anything. Think about public speaking. People fear this more than death itself. Why? Is it because they will experience pain? No, unless they're facing a very hostile audience. Is it a phobia? No, because the fear can be confronted, time and time again, and it reoccurs continuously. The true fear of public speaking is that somehow, in some way, the speaker will make such a fool of himself that he will be rejected. In some slight way, he will be pushed away.
This can be seen in other places. In prison, one of the worst punishments is solitary confinement. People who are marooned often go mad very quickly, for lack of company. The human mind needs company. Very rare is the person who can live without meeting another soul and still retain their humanity. We seek so desperately companionship, not only for a group of friends in which to trust, but also for someone to love, to trust and to spend our lives with. This too, is central.
Of all the nightmares I've had, of all the festering horrors that have attacked me from the darkness of my dreams, the ones that scar me the most, that haunt me and drive me to tears in my sleep, are the ones where I am truly alone. Where I lose the one I love, where I find myself abandoned, with no hope of ever seeing another person. Some people seek solitude, but in the same sense that some enjoy pain, it is only to a limit. No man seeks a life unobserved, no person wishes to be unseen for eternity. A life eternally unacknowledged may as well not exist.
Grim indeed. There is one last fear, however. This fear is one that is not so horrid. It is the fear for others. It is the small part of our hearts that feels for other's pain, that worries for our loved one's well-being, that shares their tears and desires their good health. This is what empathy is, in a sense. This fear is rarely noticed, but is felt every day. In extreme cases, we see it in noble acts of self-sacrifice. When a soldier throws himself over a live grenade to save the life of his squad, he no doubt feels fear. Fear of pain. Fear of death... but the fear he feels for the lives of his friends, it overpowers the others, banishes them like the rays of the morning sun banishes the clinging night. This is the only fear that could be called wholesome. I've said it before; for those with an abundance of it, empathy is both a boon and a curse. It causes pain, but it allows us to aid others, even if it's only providing a shoulder to cry on, to lean on.
I still seem to have this dark mood, wrapped about me like a dark shroud. Every so often I get a break from it, and light seeps through... but it suffocates, all the same. It's vexing. I am patient, though...
~ Matt
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| I experienced alarm when I woke up this morning. It's happened to me before, and I don't think I'm the only one who's felt this way; you wake up, you look around, and you wonder how the hell did I get here? In this, I mean the situation my life is in, in general. It's as if your mind has magically conjured up the 16-year-old that you used to be and put him behind your eyes.
As this younger you looks around, you can't help but feel a bit panicked. Graduating from college? A full time job? Bills? It seemed like yesterday that I was only going into high-school! I can't handle this! Of course, this doesn't last very long. In a few moments, the real you (in this case, a 22-year old) taps the younger on the shoulder, moves him to one side, and things are back to normal... but that doubt lingers. You can't help but wonder... am I in the right place? Am I really ready?
This brought me to the matter of fear. A person has many fears, but it's my firm belief that all fears can be traced down to a few "primal" fears. I plan on seeing if I'm right.
The first fear is easily the most obvious; the fear of pain. This fear is shared by every living creature, not just humanity. We hate pain, to some extent. True, some people find it alluring, but anyone faced with a hot poker and thumbscrews would be hard-pressed to keep that opinion for long. This fear is most obvious after someone has been hurt recently. They will shy away from the thing that hurt them, they will avoid it, or cower from it, in some cases. A good example is fire. You learn that it hurts when you touch it, and you avoid it. Surround someone in fire, and many people will fail to function.
However, of all the fears the fear of pain is most easily overcome. Mental and physical conditioning can remove its fangs. People can build up tolerances, and for the right motivation, people will take great deals of it.
The second fear, and I believe the other fears, are exclusive to humanity. The second fear is the phobia. The reasonless fear, the irrational fear. These are fears that exist contrary to evidence, for no other reason than that they exist. For some, it's the fear of spiders, although there are legitimate reasons to fear some spiders. A better example might be claustrophobia. There is no real danger inherent in small spaces. Yet some fear them more than anything imaginable. For me, this fear is needles. They don't actually hurt. Hell, they barely even sting. Yet, they somehow manage to get me worked up. Like the first fear, phobias can be overcome, but not nearly as easily.
The third fear is odd, in my opinion. This is the fear of the unknown, of the unusual. We see this fear all over. Gamers can see this easily in horror games, where, by some unusual property, polygonal figures shaped like zombies are much more terrifying than ones shaped as soldiers. The brain sees this, and tries to point out that, in game terms, there really isn't a difference. The subconscious tells the brain to shut up, zombies are scary. I feel this is one of the large reasons man fears death. It's not the act of dying that scares us, unless it's painful (see fear one), it's what comes after. People who die don't usually come back to talk about what they saw (unless they're zombies. Even then, they don't talk much). There's no eyewitness account, and so we fear it. For one more solid example, read any of H.P. Lovecraft's horror.
The fourth is one that I'm still thinking about, but it fits to me. It is the fear of being alone, of abandonment and solitude. At the moment, I've exhausted my muse for this morning, so I'll continue on this line this evening, perhaps tomorrow.
~ Matt
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| It was pointed out to me that boredom is one of the larger marvels of the human psyche.
This may seem contradictory. After all, boredom usually is the result
of an absence of things that are marvelous, amazing, or
otherwise interesting. The mind must, at this point, consider what
makes something marvelous, amazing, and so on. Surely the sun itself,
when considered, is a marvelous thing! From where we can see it, it's a
convenient source of light, hot, bright, and central to life even
existing. However, it is just as lethal, able to kill, and from a
scientific point of view, a hellish maelstrom of primal energy. How is that not amazing?
And yet, we spend many a day with it around, and it does nothing to
make our lives more interesting. We see it, and we think nothing more
of it. A sunset is one of the more beautiful things in life, at least
in a purely visual sense. It happens, day after day, and we grow tired of
that beauty. This in itself should be amazing. We find ourselves in a
world filled with wonders, wonders that lose their magic quickly under
the onslaught of boredom...
Don't get me wrong here. I'm not preaching against boredom. Boredom is necessary.
If we never got bored, well, it'd be a worthless world. People would
sit around and stare at their hands, and say things like "Woah, man..."
and "Far out...". We'd never get anything done! Boredom fills an
essential role in the mind. It keeps us from being hippies.
However... I'd urge you, everyone, to take a moment each day, and let
your boredom go. Go ahead and marvel at the subtle beauty found within
the smooth lines of a leaf on a tree. Be awestruck by the light
glinting off the snow on a clear winter's day. Let yourself wonder at
the glory of a blazing sunset. Believe me, it's worth it.
~ Matt | | |
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