Blind Faith

What is so wrong with blind faith? We have blind faith everyday that the sun will rise, that a truck won’t blindside us, that we won’t contract something infectious and deadly, that our food and water are not poisoned, that our friends truly love us and respect us … living with blind faith is a lot more reasonable than living with pure reason.

YNWA

In a medical office:

“Do you have any support?”

“No … I’m all alone. My children have left and my husband works shifts.”

It felt like she had been waiting to be asked that question. She removed her glasses and wiped her eyes. She was the kind of woman who had made preparations all her life to never be alone — large family, always eager to move to where her children were. Except her formerly neighborly son had moved, and left her stranded in the deliriously small town, where her only company, her husband, slept at 6 in the afternoon to wake up at 3 am the next day.

You can’t escape it, can you? This nagging feeling that no matter how many people are around you, you are always alone in the most important and fundamental ways?

It’s liberating and it’s exhausting. But it doesn’t have to mean loneliness.

Missed encounter

It was a dark winter evening, in the streets of slushy Hamilton. I was on the bus heading home. You were in your military uniform, camouflage draped from your thin body. You were reading On Killing, and I saw you look to your own frowning reflection. You bit your lower lip the entire ride.

Poor Places – The Case for Hamilton

Hamilton feels more real than than Europe, where the cities are fairy tale cobblestone and Sleeping Beauty castles. Hamilton is Steeltown, graffiti, and utilitarian 6-lane highways. But the derelict and tattooed exteriors of Hamilton feel more authentic than anything this side of Holt Renfrew; this is the charm of gritty urban areas. Hamilton has no pretensions of being New York City; it has no pretensions that glass exteriors and architecture are urban essentials. It is mostly utilitarian, and Hamilton won’t pretend to be anything it is not. Toronto likes to pretend it’s a Canadian being European to impress Americans. Hamilton has no veils, and is naked in the best, and poorest of ways.

Infinite Summer

This is the summer that I’ve done all the checklist premed things. I am working in a science lab, I am studying for my MCAT, and I am volunteering at a hospital. I have more focus now than I did in school. Everyday I wake up feeling lucky that I get to pursue my dream.

But the more and more I am pulled into the premed side of things, the more I struggle to make time to read a poem. The best part of my day is going to sleep with an old edition of the Norton Anthology of Literature that I bought at Value Village. T.S. Eliot is the only way to get me in bed. And I’ve been remembering poems, snippets, meanings that I thought I had forgotten, that I thought physics equations and practise MCAT questions had pushed clean out of my mind — Edmund Spenser’s One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand (I remembered it because of Sam Roberts’ “Uprising Down Under”), that dirty John Donne poem with the globe and the compass and the bizarre sexual metaphor, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. And Shakespeare, his clever little sonnets to get girls (and boys?) in bed.

I had a fairly unshakeable faith in science but I’m not sure where it’s gone now. Once you’ve seen the inner guts and workings of something … it makes you want to pray to the laws of physics that a razor-sharp looking building will stay up, that the numbers were right and the bridge won’t sway too much in the wind. But this aspect of science is still pretty amazing to me, how a few numbers, aiming a few high-energy rays at something, some mixing of samples can build a skyscraper, find out how DNA hides itself, and cure a disease. There’s a sense of optimism, that suggests if you do enough experiments and try out enough hypotheses, you must must must find the answer to what you are looking for, if not now, in another generation, at least. This sense of optimism doesn’t exist when you step into a hospital to visit a patient with the disease that you are trying to cure. Diseases are almost scientific gifts, in the sense that knowing how the body fails gives us so much insight and understanding into how it’s supposed to work. Science prefers the suffering, the mutants, the genetic knock-out mice without immune systems or the poor bacteria that can’t even synthesize a basic nucleic acid. I wonder if people know how giddy of an occasion the discovery of a rare genetic disease is. The world of science is so backwards to everyday life.

But it feels shakeable now because it’s human, because scientists are petty people too and petty people squabble about whose name will be first on a publication, and petty people feel superior to other people because they have more publications or they publish in a higher impact journal. And petty people steal results and don’t give credit and fight over money.

Christian Bale & Hannah Arendt

I entered the second semester of university with deathly images in my mind — Empire of the Sun’s Christian Bale, his white hands touching his mother’s face, scared to believe that she was real and alive and breathing after he had seen so much death and destruction, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its journalistic, throwaway facts about the Holocaust that prevented me from reading the book all the way through. I have encountered death, intimately, professionally as a palliative care volunteer, as a reader, as a writer, as an appreciative fan of war movies … but something twisted in my stomach this time. It felt different. I couldn’t stop wondering about the veneer of civilization that we live in, our bubble and the false notions of security. That we believe that life is anything but a struggle for most people, that we can expect to eat as much as we want, all day, all week, all year, is nothing short of a blessed miracle. That we forget, too easily, that the vast majority of human endeavours, that the vast majority of human history, has consisted of nothing but bmurder, of innovative ways to shed blood …

What frightens me is to know all these possibilities must exist within me because I have inherited this legacy of being human, from the first Homo sapien to fight off the Neanderthals, to the SS officer, to the Holocaust survivor. I wrote months ago about limits, but now I realize the converse, the dangers of such limits — we do not know precisely what lies within us, but the textbooks of human history should be evidence that in we contain infinite possibilities for pillaging the sacredness of life … and this frightens me.

I miss Africa

I miss Zambia. I miss the clarity of the day’s objectives, I miss the kids, I miss knowing that walking to work everyday would be an adventure, I miss not knowing what to expect. I miss being wrong. I miss being surprised, shocked, brought to the verge of tears. I miss the people, I miss the girls I met, I miss the complexity of relationships there and the sense of purpose that filled everyday. I was exhausted by the end. I stayed as long as I should have; I do not regret staying for only so long because I was not ready to handle it then. But now I think I am. I miss the sense of discovery and possibility there, that with a little spark everything could catch fire and change … or burn … but everything was infinitely changing. I was discovering something.

Travel has never been introspective. Here, at school, I am introspective, sometimes harmfully so, withdrawing so far in that I’m probably missing out on something. But that sense of possibility just feels so dull here. I have never been as clear about what I wanted do as I was over there. There, I was outside of myself, and there there was nowhere to hide, from what we have done and what we have failed to do.

The New Selfish Altruists

This I can’t stand:

The new breed of selfish altruism — getting internships with NGOs, charities and passing these resume-builders off as genuine, heartwrenching attempts to change the wicked wicked world with their tears blood and sweat. Self-congratulatory charity work. My gold standard for discerning if a charity/NGO does any actual work is the content on their website. If the name of their founder or organization is in a bigger typeset than the name of the population/cause that they are working for, then they are not worth it. This is what bothers me about celebrities advocating for charity causes — the publicity is never about the cause, the publicity is always about the celebrity advancing the cause. I’m sure that Bono has good intentions in raising funds, but really — the brand of (red) crap is nothing but obnoxious, self-congratulatory branding and merchandising, designed solely to make the companies feel good.

And I have seen this attitude of expecting PR releases upon the smallest of good works in some of my peers, and I think it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because it gives the illusion of advancement when it is nothing but an illusory facade, that makes your willingness to work for the world weak, unfocused and atrophied. There is nothing wrong with recognizing accomplishments, but — reflect on them whether they are real accomplishments, whether something concrete has been created, before anything else. Ask yourself if you have done this to genuinely serve, or to solely add another few impressive key words into your CV. Ask yourself if it has made you a better human being, or just a better looking candidate on paper.