Margins

Margins have been on my mind lately. Katie and I had a conversation the other day about our plans for the next twelve months. We're trying to decide how many credit hours I should take next year, among other things; I'm concerned about our margins. I hate being busy, so one of my goals for the next year is to minimize busyness as much as possible. Katie pointed out that no matter how many things we're actually doing, we always manage to let our current tasks expand to fill all available space so that we always feel busy.

Which brings me to margins. How do I set margins and live within them when I feel busy no matter how much I do? The answer, of course, is self-discipline*. Living with margins takes discipline; mostly, it seems it takes the discipline to say 'No.' Yes, the discipline to say 'no' to other people, but mostly the discipline to say 'No' to myself. I would like to think there is some other way to live with margins, but that seems to be what it boils down to. Hopefully, when I learn to have the discipline to say 'no', I will find the freedom to say 'yes'.

*I say this answer is no fun, but life must be more than fun (unfortunately).

On Reading, Writing, the Malaise, and Fantasy Literature

I am currently reading Luke's Gospel, Tolkien's Roverandom, and Rossignol's This Gaming Life. Luke is challenging me, but I'm not sure I'm rising up to the challenge. I like Roverandom so far. It is much more whimsical than Tolkien's other pieces as it is a children's story, even moreso than The Hobbit, in fact. The introduction to This Gaming Life seems to be out to prove a point in defending the value of games by arguing for their ability to sharpen the mental reflexes of gamers and increase their ability to process information from multiple sources simultaneously. That's all well and good, but I look forward to seeing what else he has to say about video games and gamer culture.

I'm considering enrolling in a course on Creative Fiction next semester as an elective, so I've been thinking lately about what kind of fiction I might write. I would like to write about the Malaise, but I'll have to come at it from my own angle. How does one such as me write about the Malaise in a way that people understand? The Malaise, for me, seems to stem out of tasks of mental abstraction. Ironically, some of the things I most love--computers and games--seem to be the triggers for the abstraction of my self from itself. If I want to write about the Malaise, I will have to relate it to those things somehow.

Of course, I could also make an attempt at fantasy literature, as I have had an interest in doing since my childhood. I tend to feel very critical of modern fantasy literature. Tolkien invented the genre and very few have done anything truly original with it since then. For some reason, fantasy novelists seem incapable of separating the genre of fantasy from the epic scale it participates in within Tolkien's literature. My theory is that most fantasy novelists would be better off sticking to smaller adventures, or fantastical travelogues, rather than trying to create their own worlds. Maybe I just feel this way because Fellowship was my favorite of the trilogy and I think a lot can be done with the journey theme, but I also know that Tolkien spent years crafting Middle Earth, and he did it from his viewpoint as a linguist--it seems a little foolhardy for so many authors to try to start where he finished.

Life, Lately

I feel different about life than I ever have before. I am working 25-32 hours each week while also going to all of my classes and doing a full-time students' work-load. It feels like a lot to do, and it is, but I am doing it all so that I can marry a sweet girl that I met a year and a half ago. Even though I'm the busiest I have ever been and should be really stressed out, I really don't mind.

Life with Katie is moving forward as it should. We have found a place to live and have budgeted out our income to ensure we can actually live there. I miss her more when we are apart than I used to, and I appreciate her presence for its own sake in ways I did not before. Unfortunately, I do not get to see her as often as I am accustomed to seeing her because of the times that I work--she works in the mornings and afternoons, and I work almost exclusively in the evenings. After homework is considered, we have practically no overlapping free time. But still, it is not so hard. Maybe this is what Jacob felt like when he was working to marry Rachel--he probably did not see her very often either, if he was working as hard for Laban as I have always imagined him to. Of course, he had to work for 7 years, and I am getting married in less than two months, so I suppose I have the easier deal.

In the meantime, my spiritual development (which was just beginning to blossom this time last month) has come to a dead halt again by nature of my absence of discipline. Of course, it does not help that I am also addicted to a board game and I find myself thinking about it when I wake up in the morning, or even as I drift off to sleep at night; while I find that disturbing, I do not find it as disturbing as you probably do--you must understand, the game in question is really cool.

But even though I feel like my spiritual development has halted, I know that it hasn't. The season of my life right now seems to be one of knowing God's presence without feeling it. Every time I get a paycheck, I thank God for the ways that He is providing for us, and I take comfort in knowing that He is taking care of me. Part of me would like to say that there is some great struggle inside me, but on this matter there is none. God is providing enough for me.

In some sense I feel that I have reached a point of spiritual maturity, but I know that if I were also self-disciplined I would be grounded in the spiritual disciplines. So there is a conflict within me, it is just not an impassioned one. I am comfortable in my spirituality and content to let God do the work of coming close to me, but I am not going through any of the motions that will let me draw closer to Him in turn. I know this is awful, but I don't feel bad when I try to do anything different and fail. God's grace is more than anything I can do, and it is much more than a free ride out of sin.

Put differently, the struggle is this: there is no reason not to memorize Ephesians (a very real goal of mine), and there are many reasons that I should, but I don't need to do so, so I do not. What I need is the self-discipline (or a smack up the side of my head) to do the host of things that I will need to be in the habit of doing later in life. But how do I get self-discipline? There doesn't seem to be a switch in the back of my head labeled "Self Discipline: on/off," because I have tried to flip it a number of times to no avail. Do I wait for God to flip that switch in me? Because I'm already doing that. Here I am again at the same conundrum I have faced over and over again for countless months. God is good though, and He is bigger than my conundrums--that is what keeps me from losing my head.