I Was Young When I Left Home

effyeahnerdfighters:

We’ll have this fixed as soon as possible. Bear with us, please.

EDIT: Pass the time making Your Pants jokes, perhaps?

why would someone do something so terrible like that in yourpants?

First, a thought experiment:

Technically speaking, God, or some other being with God-like powers, could have just created us a moment ago. Literally. You think you read the beginning of this paragraph, but you didn’t, that’s just a pre-implanted memory. The whole universe, science, religion, history? Pre-implanted. The only thing you can, in theory, be sure about with any certainty, is life around you at this very moment. But the present is slowly (or quickly, depending how you think about it) slipping into the past, into our memories. And our memories are notoriously fickle and unreliable. As John Green aptly said: “You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.” And there so much truth to that. The memories we have, are in a sense, the memories we choose to have. They get warped, through the embellishment of retelling, and just by how our brains function when we’re not looking. And I can’t pretend to know if that scares you, but it definitely scares me. Here’s why:

I’m self-centered; I often ruminate on a little idea: that the dead live on in the memories of the living. And I sure as hell don’t want to live on in some warped, embellished memory. But this idea scares me even more for another reason: The injustice I do to those who must live on in my own memory. That by carrying the ghosts of people and places past, I am in some way reducing them. By bearing their crosses as my own (if you’ll excuse the religious reference that, by all rights, I should be the last person to use), it is not just I who is being held back, but them too, maybe even more so.

Is there a point to this?

Hopefully, this will remind you to try, as Thoreau attempted, to “to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment.” The things you hold with you are, by all means, of grave importance, and shouldn’t be released completely. But remember: just as they hold you back, you are returning the favor.

As a young child, first in the United States, then in Israel, my parents read to me all the time. When I moved back to the U.S. at the age of 6-and-a-half, I could read in Hebrew, but not English. This posed a problem to almost-second-grade-me, but with the help of my parents, I learned to read within a month of the beginning of the school year, and by the end, I was one of the most avid readers in my class. I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn’t discern much between books with literary value and books that were all plot. When my dad first read The Chronicles of Narnia to me, I completely missed all the metaphors that I would later understand upon hearing him read it to my younger sister. While my love for books flourished, so too did my love of sports, especially baseball. In my free time, if I wasn’t playing baseball, I was likely reading about it. I read and played avidly until seventh grade, when I returned to “conventional” schooling, all of a sudden, I had other things, like grades, and girls. Baseball became secondary, reading too. Eighth grade was more of the same.

Then came ninth grade. It suddenly dawned on me that I would have the chance to play on my school’s baseball team. The summer before ninth grade, I worked out a lot, played baseball at every chance I got. That fall and winter, I joined the wrestling team to get in better shape. When tryouts neared, I played catch in the cold wintery outdoors with whomever was willing. I made the varsity team with little difficulty. While on the team, I befriended the scorekeeper, who introduced me to Nerdfighteria. She and her awesome nerdy friends introduced me to John Green (his books, I still have yet to meet him). I soon rediscovered my passion for reading, a passion I had given up in a (failed) attempt to “be cool.”

Through books and nerdiness (which has again given me the right to be enthusiastic about the things and people I love), I found different friends that I never would have otherwise met, and achieved a different, and better, kind of “cool.”