The scientific method

I was really proud of myself the day I told my third block English class that they had to have the foresight to see the hindsight. I was hoping there was someone with ink and quill somewhere to jot down this line into a tome of timeless quotes, my name now among Abraham Lincoln and Confucius. I don't even remember the topic of that day's discussion, but I was giving some pseudo-sage advice about making wise decisions -- about considering the consequences of actions. Hindsight, we all know, is 20/20. So we have to look forward and consider what that hindsight will reveal to us. This is the simple and infallible key to decision-making.

It is also complete crap.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I cannot make decisions. I cower at questions and flee from responsibility. I don't know, maybe someday an editor of Bartlett's will include me, but only by mistake. Or only because of the cute parallelism of the sentence: We must have the foresight to see the hindsight.

As it turns out, this is a rule that I've been imposing upon myself for a very long time, but I didn't realize it until today. Let's face it, I'm drowning in a sea of decisions that need to be made. Or so it seems. They range from small (What am I going to teach tomorrow?) to larger (What am I going to do after I graduate? With my life?). And I get the distinct feeling that these are all connected. Like I can't answer one question unless I've answer the others. A circular puzzle. A dog chasing its tail, for sure. But nevertheless, I have been sorting out my thoughts in an attempt at answering the larger questions. The answers, though, don't come.

That's what I have been expecting for as long as I have had a concept of The Future. That life, its questions, and its answers come to me as they will, and I will be prepared to go with that flow as it drifts by. Recently, though -- and I am using a lose definition of the adverb "recently" -- I am realizing that passivity isn't exactly the best way of handling life. Yes, there are factors that we cannot control -- circumstances that present themselves, and the best we can hope for is to roll with the punches. But really, we have to be active, to be intentional, to take initiative. I realize this.

The problem is, though, that I don't take iniative. That requires making a decision. It requires, so I thought, the foresight to see the hindsight. It sounds noble, doesn't it? It's impossible, though. How can we possibly ever see the future?

I don't purport to have all the answers, but I think I've found one. I've looked at the decisions I've made, including some very pronounced indecision, and at the crises that surrounded those decisions. Then, I solved for x. Okay, it was more of a guess-and-hope strategy, but when I plugged "fear of regret" into all the equations, they balanced.

I have been operating on the principle that I should know how everything will turn out. Somewhere along the timeline, I got the idea that looking at all the possibilities of cause and effect was healthy. And I don't know, maybe it is. But what happens is that I try to channel my future hindsight, and as soon as I detect the possibility of regret, I melt down.

I know the what-if game is supposed to be pointless. But I always thought of that in the context of looking at the past. Somehow I have excused it by looking to the future -- unforeseeable as it may be -- and playing the what-if game with decisions that haven't even been made yet.

I'm afraid I'll make the wrong decision. It's that simple.

The question remains, though, what exactly is it that I am afraid of? How bad is a bad decision? Obviously, there are some decisions that are just plain bad, but what about the ones that are more nebulous? It's like forcing gray to be either black or white.

What ever convinced me that I wouldn't be able to recover from a mistake? Who ever told me that once I'm in a dreadful situation I wouldn't be able to get out of it?

There was a student in the same third block class who once encouraged me with a quote after I had attempted to conduct an activity that had not worked at all. In disgust at my own choice of instruction and at the group's failure to cooperate, I said something about it having been an experiment that had completely failed. He raised his hand and said, "No experiment is a failure." I responded, "Why? Because we learn from it?" He nodded his head affirmatively.

We can hypothesize all we want, but we never know what results an experiment will yield until we have actually carried out the process. Maybe life is just an exercise in trial-and-error, in guess-and-hope. Or maybe there are scientific proofs and mathemathical equations we can use to predict everything and to avoid hardships, but something tells me that there aren't.

All I know is that when I'm trying to make a decision, all I can see is the possibility that, no matter what I choose, it all might go disastrously wrong. I forget that it all might go miraculously right. I just never know.

The theory of relativity

This summer, when Holly and I were traisping around Europe, we visited the apartment in Bern, Switzerland, in which Albert Einstein conceived the theory of relativity. After reading over the panels of information hanging on the walls and even making shadow puppets on wall where a documentary of his life was being projected, I still don't understand the theory of relativity. I just put my trust in the knowledge that it has influenced our lives and that being in the room where it sprang into his imagination is something of an interesting experience.

Now that fall is setting in, I spend my days in a high school classroom extolling the wonders of literature to students, sometimes to receive only blank stares in return. One of those blank stares came back to me when, in a what-I-thought-was-explanatory moment, I said, "Well, everything is relative, right?"

For whatever reason, I didn't take that moment to explain myself, but something occurred to me. This understanding of general relativity that some of us enjoy isn't innate. Somewhere along the line, probably in a university humanities or philosophy course, someone pointed out to us that everything is dependent on everything else for its quiddity. ["Quiddity" is a word I recently learned. It means essence or thingness.]

To define a word, we need other words. To define ourselves, we look to the selves of others and differentiate for meaning. For instance, I am a daughter only relative to my parents. If someday I have children, I will be a mother relative to their being my offspring, but I will still be a daughter. It is the paradox we live in.

Like, right now, I am a student teacher. The term "student teacher" itself seems an oxymoron, but it is apt. I am teaching my students, but I am still learning from my own teachers. I pass seamlessly from one end of the spectrum to the other without notice. But I wonder, do we retain something in this liquid process, or are we just mutable, intangible somethings -- real only within our contexts?

Leave it to me to look to a tree for answers, but I think this example helps me know that I am more than my relative definition: When growing up, I liked to play under trees. I have yet to explain this kinship with them except that, through the years, I have drawn more analogies between human existence and the nature of trees than I can now name. However, in the years before I realized my very existence could be explained through dendrological metaphors, I played beneath the backyard hickory nut tree.

I could bound out the backdoor of our trailer and run diagonally to the right, at some indeterminate angle, and land within a few seconds under my favorite tree. It was a rather uncomfortable play place, what with all the sharp, broken hickory nuts poking out of the ground, but I put them to good use and collected the bits as currency in my make-believe economy. (See, money really did grow on trees...) Eventually, however, I outgrew the tree, and its attraction and (monetary) value faded with my age. We moved away, too, so visiting the tree every afternoon wasn't feasible, even if we still owned the land on which it stood.

Now, around thirteen years later, my parents are building a house on the farm, which is where our trailer used to sit. Interestingly, though, the house has been built farther back on the property. The trailer, were it still around, would now be in the front yard of the new house. The hickory tree, though, still stands, and it is in the front yard. My beloved tree stands sentinel to the left of the front porch steps. (Left, that is, if you're coming down the steps. See, relativity.) So now the tree that I always viewed as "the backyard tree" is now a "front yard tree." Who knew how much orientation colored my understanding...

But this backyard/front yard tree, though my concept of it has changed, is not really different. Putting a house behind it didn't change it. Sure, it has grown another year's worth of leaves, bark, and hickory nuts, but beneath that is all the growth that happened during the years when it was behind the house and during the years when there was no house around it at all. No matter what situation we put the tree in, it is still the same.

Doesn't that mean something? Does it mean that no matter what situation I am in, no matter what definition I acquire due to my surroundings, I am still me? Maybe it is a simple understanding. And maybe I don't even understand the implications of it yet, but I like it.

I wonder if, someday, adventurous twentysomethings will make shadow puppets on these walls. I doubt it.

If I am alive this time next year.

After I had been blogging for a year or so, it became an OCD obsession of mine to make sure that I posted an entry to this blog at least once a month so that my archives list would always show consecutive months. Alas, this is no longer true.

It seems that blogging has fallen out of fashion among people I know. This is reasonable. I did not quit writing on the blog because it was, say, uncool -- whatever that may be. It petered out because I didn't have time to write, or I didn't have anything to say. While I am not sure much has changed, I find myself missing the blog. So here I am with a two-month gap in my archives list.

I am sitting in my apartment on this Wednesday night. I am only here briefly because, these summer days, I try to stay at home as much as possible. At home, I am spending my days trying to get prepared for student teaching this fall. It is still unreal to me that I won't walk Murray's campus anymore as a student enrolled in proper classes. While graduate school has been on my mind lately, it sure hasn't been a vision of Kentucky's Public Ivy bouncing around in my head. So, I am making my oh-so-blurry transition from student to teacher, a hazy area between the two ends of the continuum that I imagine I will never fully venture out of. I am excited to delve into America's literary history with a group of high school juniors this fall, but I can't help but already miss the classroom in which I am the student.

Anyhow, the things on my mind tonight? I am wondering what my hair will look like this time tomorrow. I am bravely handing over my hair to an unknown stylist who will hopefully do some magic to transfigure me from lazy student to semi-professional educator -- avoiding a "teacher" haircut at all costs.

Also, I am geekily anticipating the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I won't lie and say I am not excited. It always bugged me when certain childhood friends of mine used the word "excited" in such a way that it carried a negative connotation, meaning emotionally upset. Perhaps, though, this is what I mean here by "excited."

In the more traditional sense of the word, I am here to proclaim my exultation at the discovery that even the Murray WalMart stocks Nutella, the hazelnut and chocolate spread that enamors all those who have tasted it abroad. I was so excited that I even developed this somewhat-fraudulent graphic to display my relief.

With this probably being the one and only post added to my blog in the light of this "rededication," I say so long. Perhaps I will keep it up. Only time will tell.

Don't go breaking my heart.

The past week has been interesting, indeed.

• I got my nose pierced. This, of course, is old news these days.
• I had my first accident in which I am the one to blame. Backed into a car in the Corvette Lanes parking lot. You can get any classier than that.
• I found out my rent is going up and that my landlady wants me to sign a new contract. This puts me in a particularly precarious position as far as living arrangements go. Who knows where I'll be nine months from now, much less a year, which means I can't sign a year contract. Which means that I don't know where I'll be living, like, a month from now. Oh, I think I just had an instantaneous nervous breakdown.
• And other assorted matters of the heart which I cannot quite verbalize.

I am putting my Scholars Week presentation together. Me, oh my. What fun.

First thing I remember.

This title of this entry is in honor of the realization I had about the parallel structure of Paul Simon's "Late in the Evening" and Better than Ezra's "Recognize." Not that it's earth-shattering. It's just that I realized it all of a sudden and was surprised at how I had missed it for so long.

To be honest, the only reason I'm checking in here is to say that I've been feeling as intense need to be creative. Maybe it has something to do with spring. I've made a purse, which is what I am most proud of. I've redesigned this blog thing. Kinda. I've been shooting some pictures. I feel like busting out my watercolors. To paint what, I'm not sure.

The good question, though, is why the heck am I sitting in the library?