Chaos

I've found that sometimes when I sit down to write this blog, I have barely an idea of what I want to say.  It's like I just start typing, and somehow it all comes out.  I think today's Thought really embodies that feeling and the feeling I get being out of school.  While school is all neat and compartmentalized, life outside of school is anything but.  It's a hodge-podge of everything.  It's chaos.

Looking back on my agriculture classes, I have been set on the right path to deal with this chaos.  A metal shop became much more than just welding.  It became a place for measuring, calculating, and creating.  A landscaping design became a lesson in geometry, a lesson in visual design, and a lesson in biology all at once.  It's this requirement for embracing a bunch of things at once, chaos, that truly prepared me for life.

Many times, we want to control the chaos in our lives.  I know I am a control freak that has to be in control as much as possible.  Rather than controlling, we should be embracing.  Rather than trying to bring this crazy thing called life back into our control, we should be acknowledging and moving on.  In truth, I don't think anyone knows what they are doing in life.  It's all a scene of trying to do what feels right.  Sometimes that feeling leads us astray.  And  yet sometimes, that feeling gives us the best opportunities we ever could find.  How will you embrace the chaos?

Attitude

This last spring semester I had the opportunity to teach a group of middle school students as part of on after school program.  I had often heard that middle school is the hardest age to teach, but I had never experienced that challenge.  Throughout the semester I had good days and I had bad days.  Sometimes the students just got on my nerves to no end, and some days they gave me the best hour of the day.  The teacher whose room I used had a habit of putting up quotes on his whiteboard everyday.  This quote really spoke to me as I was teaching these blooming young minds.

Many days, it was hard teaching this group of students.  Looking back, it was the most challenging teaching experience I have ever had.  That's not to say I didn't learn anything, on the contrary, I  learned more about myself as a teacher than I had ever learned before.  Every day I walked into that classroom, I had a decision to make.  What was my attitude going to be for the day?  Was I going to let something that happened at college get me down?  Or was I going to brush it all off and do my best to teach my students?  It's a decision we all have to make, everyday.  We ARE in charge of our attitude. 

Fraternity

Today's Thought comes from the archives over at Art of Manliness.  Being a fraternity man myself (MN FarmHouse, Fall '10), I really identified with this thought.  While we don't have someone firing bullets at us up in St. Paul, we do have same sense of camaraderie and cohesion.  I'm not sure what it is about the men we have, but each and every one us are brothers.  I've never experienced it, but I have no doubt that many other fraternities have this same sense of brotherhood.

This reminds me of an interesting ritual we do at FarmHouse when we are initiating new members.  We call the activity 'String Web'.  The idea is that a ball of yarn represents the bonds of our brotherhood.  Each brother explains why he is glad another brother is a part of the house.  After making this statement, the brother grabs a hold of the string and throws it to the brother he talked about.  At the end of the activity, the last brother makes the statement: "Just as a spiders web is the strongest structure in nature, the bond of brother is the strongest bond in life."

What is Fraternity?  Perhaps the first thing you thought of when you saw this title is Animal House.  I can tell you firsthand that Animal House is the furthest thing from true Fraternity.  Clancy Lyall gives us about the best description of Fraternity in this picture that I have ever heard.  It's not even a gender thing.  Anyone can have Fraternity the way Mr. Lyall meant the word.  Just as a spiderweb appears slight, yet strong beyond it's means, the bonds of Fraternity hold true through the worst storms.  While the sense of Fraternity in your life is probably not borne from fighting a war, it is likely the same sense.  Who are those people in your string web?  What is your Fraternity?

Labels

Call me Ishmael.  If you have ever read Moby Dick, you know that today's Thought starts in just that manner.  Yet in typical Gary Larson fashion, he has taken a classic and turned into something quite humorous.  But in the end, what does 'Ishmael' signify?

Around the table at lunch time today, my co-workers and I got into a discussion about the proper naming of the meals.  We all agreed on Breakfast, but  the room was split on whether it is Lunch or Dinner.  One co-worker even said, "I don't even know what that is!" in response to one of us calling the noontime meal 'dinner'.  While we all had a good chuckle, it got us thinking.  Eventually another co-worker suggested this would be good material for a blog post.  I must say, I agree with her.

What are labels?  At their core, they help us identify unique objects, events, outcomes, or even people.  At times accurate, they can be tremendously misleading.  How many times have you looked at something's label and immediately dismissed it as being worthless?  Perhaps it was a pair of shoes that didn't quite have a good name, or maybe it was food on a menu that didn't quite call your name.  Many times, those labels just tell part of the story.  In the end, a label is just a placeholder, an identifier.

I think we are currently suffering from a huge reliance on labels and an utter disregard for true research and understanding.  Take recent policy proceedings, name the recently failed Farm Bill.  Listening to people who were in the room during the tallying of the vote, they were utterly shocked to see the bill failing.  It seemed to have wide-ranging support and many agreed it was the right thing to pass.  And yet, it failed.  Somewhere along the line, someone didn't do the research.  This doesn't stop just in politics.  It goes on all around us.  I know in my own life, many times while researching for a paper, I will read the title of a study or even the abstract and immediately discard it as having no value for me.  And yet, it's only when I sit down and do some true research do I see the true value.  Do you do the research?  Do you see the value?

Legendary

I suspect that many people have a pretty good idea about the origins of this picture.  If you watch the TV show How I Met Your Mother, you know that Barney Stinson is noted for 'suiting up' because it's going to be legen- wait-for-it -dary.  What exactly is going to be legendary is the big question.

What's legendary in your life?  A legend is typically something that is elevated to almost-folk lore.  It's that awesome that it's almost too much to believe.  So perhaps a better question is this: What's your legend?

I know in my own life, I often struggle with this.  It's an innate human desire (in my experience) that we want to have some effect, leave some sign behind.  As I've grown to be an upperclassman in my fraternity, the idea of my legacy and legend comes up.  Am I being the kind of person that people will remember?  What can I do so that people remember me?  Perhaps a legend isn't an event or some act that you completed.  Maybe it's the people around you.  What am I doing for the people around me?

This summer, I've had the genuine please of becoming friends with a truly outstanding group of people.  Within the second outing as a group, we were all laughing and joking like we were old friends.  The more I think about it, these people, and everyone else around me, is my legend.  Maybe, my legend isn't someTHING that I leave behind, rather, it's someONE.  In the end, people don't remember what you did, they remember how you made them feel and how you helped them.  What is YOUR legend?

Education

What's the value of a good education?  It's a question that I think many college kids like myself struggle with.  So many times I find myself thinking, "What exactly am I paying $24,000 a year for?  Today's Thought, courtesy of Bill Watterson in the form of Calvin and Hobbes answers that question in spades.

I know I'm not the first to believe in the value of a good education.  Walter Kronkite once said, "Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation".  Perhaps that is why I chose to become a teacher.  However, I firmly believe I am a student first and a teacher second.  No matter what we do, we must be learners.  If we don't learn, we will spend our lives falling down because we have both feet through one pant leg.

It is my goal to learn something new everyday, and I sincerely encourage everyone to join me in that goal.  It doesn't matter what you are learning, as long as you are learning something that contributes to your personal improvement as a neighbor, brother, sister, friend, human being.  A final thought: What did you learn today, yesterday, and the day before that?  What will you learn today?

Power

Today's Thought comes courtesy of the website Art of Manliness.  This was in a post on reading.  Now we all learned how to read, probably in elementary school.  If not, I suppose this amounts to a scathing condemnation of our educational system.  Power is something that everyone, at some point in his or her life, seeks.  It's all around us, and yet it often seems to lead only to corruption.  Hollywood has pointed that out to us many times.  So then, what makes the idea of power so alluring?

Today at work, a couple of my coworkers were interviewing someone over the phone for a magazine article.  I won't get into particulars of the discussion or participants, but I will say that the person being interviewed was a very down-to-earth, respectable gentleman.  At some point in the conversation, the idea of education came up.  He talked how he and his family worked hard and worked honestly to improve themselves.  That's how he got to where he is today.

In the end, education is at the root.  Education is what challenges us as people, it's what helps us grow and learn.  Perhaps that's why I decided to go into education as a career.  It's true, books and education are the way to get ahead honestly and fairly.  Education is the definition of personal improvement.  If we are unwilling to learn, how can we grow?  How can we find power?  Are you developing the power within you?  It's there, I promise.  So this weekend, go to the library, read a book.  Or maybe you have that novel that's been sitting on the shelf for months that you always mean to pick up, yet never seem to read.  I know I have those books.  So take the time.  Read a book.  Develop the power that is within you.