What A View

Human beings in the 21st Century have pretty complicated existences. Unlike our counterparts from the middle ages, who dealt with the black death killing all of their friends and neighbors, or those of the stone age, who had to worry about getting dinner and not being eaten by a sabre tooth tiger, most of our difficulties in modern Western society are man made.

We have cell phones, Facebook, email accounts, and a litany of daily activities that keep us busy for the bulk of our day. We're stressed out. We're frantic. And dammit, the things we need to get accomplished are way more important and pressing than anything you could have to deal with.

I felt much like this over the last few weeks. I'm frantic about several things - from graduate school to where I'll be living a year from now - and it felt as though the walls were closing in around me. I walked a bit more hunched over, I drove faster - cursing traffic in front of me, I was irritable over just about everything. If you wondered why Skewed had lost some of its satirical bite, you now know why. Good satire requires a mix of being annoyed while still being upbeat enough to make fun of it. I was simply not upbeat enough...

There was a brilliant article I read on Sports Illustrated several weeks ago, and I'm buggered if I can find the link to cite it. Nevertheless - the article was discussing Andre Agassi's approach to tennis in his later career. Here is a snippet: He cocoons himself in process, obsesses over what tension his rackets are strung at, tweaks them each day according to temperature, humidity, wind. Fixates on this forehand or backhand even when they're fine, three days of drama involving everyone in his camp until, yes, he's figured it out, moved his hand an eighth of an inch... No. Wait. It's the balls. Too much fuzz - they don't feel right. No. It must be the court. Damn, it's so exhausting, no wonder he's always on the verge of dropping the shovel and walking away. Because it's always so near, that urge. One slight shift in perspective, one glance out of the tunnel...

I'm certainly not a great tennis player, but this is the kind of single minded approach I take to things I need to get done in life. My academics fall much along these lines, and you can ask Carl or Blake - I'm usually pretty anal retentive about things. By the end of this week, I was peeking out of the tunnel, a lot - and feeling overwhelmed by the urge to quit. "Get your BA degree and call it a day... you just aren't up to this," my mind kept repeating to me. The pressure was overwhelming and I was starting to crack.

I drove home yesterday afternoon after a long day of reading about the Weimar Republic, analyzing literature, and practicing French yet again. I was tired. But the weather was gorgeous and my commute home isn't what one would call normal. I drive over Blood Mountain. 100 miles every day over some of the most scenic views you'll ever see. People bring their Porsche's and BMW's up from Atlanta to take in the views on Blood Mountain - and to drive on some amazing stretches of twisting, turning, intense roadway - which just happens to be my daily commute.

At the peak of Blood Mountain is the Walasi-Yi Center - a rest stop for road weary vacationers and nature weary hikers venturing along the Appalachian Trail. It also has one of the most beautiful views of the mountains you'll ever see in Georgia. So I pulled in, turned off my car, took a deep breath, and decided it was time to take in the view yet again.

I used to stop far more frequently when I started college, but with increasing work loads and decreasing free time, I usually fly by the Walasi-Yi Center with a passing glance as Soundgarden blares through my car speakers and I drive the twists and turns of highway 19/129 as though I was Michael Schumacher.

But this evening, as the sun was turning everything around me a golden color, I walked up the stony steps, past the quietly singing wind chimes, and found myself a quiet spot to sit and absorb what was around me. The view was majestic. The mountains arching up on either side of me, tall pines and hardwoods stretching to the heavens, the moon appearing in the bright blue sky directly above me. And with the GRE coming up, applications to get in, exams, term papers, thesis defense, graduation, and drastic changes in my life all speeding towards me - one amazing and brilliant thing happened when I turned the corner of the stony Walasi-Yi building and the view opened up...

It all stopped.

The most noticeable aspect about the view wasn't the view itself. It wasn't the rolling mountains, the faint beginnings of Autumn in the leaves, the vista that stretched for miles and miles into a pink sunset, it wasn't the chirping of the birds or the light breeze that blew through the crisp, cool air. It was the absolute silence. All of the noise of my thoughts vanished and life suddenly came back into perspective. I was very small again, my life minute compared to the amazing place I inhabited. My problems shrank, my stress diminished, and I was reminded yet again how much bigger the world, the universe, God Himself is, compared to GRE tests and applications to graduate school.

Surely some of my readers are scratching their heads. Where is the sarcasm? Where is the pessimism? Where is the punchline? This isn't one of those posts. Life can be utterly overwhelming at times. The stress will surely rise again and again, as it always does, but the reminder here should be to never let things fall too far out of perspective.

So the next time you feel like you're going to crack - stop yourself. Go to a place like this one and take in the world around you. Finding your way through life isn't about winning or losing - it's about remembering. Remembering your place in it, remembering the awe you feel when you really step back and see the world around you - and then remembering just how utterly amazing it all is, even with the stress we cozy Westerners bring down on ourselves in this 24 hour, electronically fed hysteria we live in these days.