Day 75: Wear Sunscreen!

Something tells me that I am about to repeat myself. Repeating yourself is a sign of old age, and I am getting old. My dad repeats himself a lot. Or not really repeats himself as much as talks about the same subject time after time. But that isn’t my point. My point is that I feel like I am starting to repeat myself. I think repeating yourself isn’t caused by getting old as much as it is loosing your memory. Loosing your memory means you don’t know if you have said something or not and so you say it again just to make sure, or you don’t remember saying it in the first place so you just talk about what is on your mind and it happens to be the same thing that was on your mind yesterday, but you don’t remember.

Does anybody remember the song by Baz Luhrmann, “Wear Sunscreen”? It was a remake of an article written by Mary Schmich as if she had been asked to speak at a college graduation. It is a good song and I think about quotes from it often. Just in case you don’t remember, here are the words:

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

I am sitting on the Flying Scotsman train from Edinburgh to London. It is a seven hour ride and so there is time to kill. The train has outlets that you can plug a computer in which means I am able to use my computer. (I made it back to St. Andrews and picked up my adapter and battery charger.) In using my computer, I was organizing old emails and rereading some of them.

This brings me to the song. Line 11 states, “Keep your old love letters. Throw away old bank statements.” I have taken that advice. It is actually pretty easy since the advent of the computer, Internet, and email. So I am organizing old emails and I come across some old, but unsent, love letters that I wrote.

(I have to pause for a moment because the train is paralleling the Scottish coast and so I have an opportunity to peer out on the North Sea.)

Beautiful, but I will talk about that in a moment.

Reading through the old letters, I was reminded of some things, a lot of things. It is good advice to keep your old love letters because they can, if it was a positive relationship, remind you of ways that you grew as a person. If it was a bad relationship then it reminds you of mistakes that you made and again ways that you grew as a person. Either way, you grew. A friend of mine from college made this statement, “Character is inevitable. You can’t help but build character.” He was saying that in any situation, any one at all, you always build some sort of character. Good situations, bad situations, you always build character. Some situations build more than others, but in all situations you are building character. And he wasn’t meaning that that is always good character. Some situations build bad character in a person, but always character.

Using that logic, you can call a relationship a situation and know that all relationships build character in a person. I know that my character has been built significantly through my few female relationships and I am happy for each one. (Now, I have to be careful, because I know that this is going to be read by at least one of those past relationships. I am going to be honest up front and tell you that I am holding back some of what I would say if that wasn’t the case. I normally wouldn’t do that, but in this situation I want to protect the innocent and myself, the guilty.)

The most recent love letter was from a few months ago. It was spurred by my reading of “Blue Like Jazz”. I mentioned the book in my last post and I think that is what brought me around in a big circle to the here and now of writing about it again. BLJ was written by Don Miller. Its subtitle is something about Christian Spirituality. Don is a thirty something dude that lives in Portland, OR. He grew up in the “Christian” church, but became turned off by the whole religion thing because of how fake he became. I think he went to bible school or something, because in his twenties he was a major Christian youth speaker. He did that for a few years but quit because he realized that he was the biggest fake out there. After a few years of searching, he found Jesus.

His book speaks a lot to me. I can really relate to the author’s life, especially the part about feeling fake. All through high school and college, I was fake. The last six years have been the start of my journey, like Don’s, in finding Jesus. It has been an amazing journey. I love the mountains and my journey is no different than a hike through the mountains, incredible highs and murky lows. My journey started with a big high, meeting an awesome girl, followed by an intense low, being rejected by the same. Oh the hours I could spend writing about that, but I won’t. I will tell you about a more recent leg of that journey. Back to the love letter.

I was recently past a short dating relationship. In my normal retrospective self, I spent hours and hours thinking about, dwelling on, and holding fictitious conversations with the ex. Having recently discovered the art of writing things down, that email was one of those conversations. If you can’t tell, I like writing, at least now. Typing is especially enjoyable because I do it much faster and afterwards I can actually reread it and not be utterly confused by my own handwriting. In my conversation, I was talking about a part in BLJ that I had just read. This is part of what I said:

“See, girls are an enigma to me. I see them, and talk to them, and read about them but still, I don't get them. But maybe that is the thing; we are not supposed to get each other. One of the guys in this book (Blue Like Jazz) is married and he and the author were talking about marriage and the ups and downs. The married guy said that marriage isn't what he expected. Still wonderful, but not what he expected. He was expecting it to be a union of two people that would know each other completely and be completely open and honest and real with each other. He said that wasn't the case. Oh, his wife knew him better than anyone else in this world, but still there were things he kept from her, things that only God knew and would only ever know. I wonder if this is why Jesus says we are not going to be married in heaven. Here on earth, marriage is fine because it helps us see God more clearly. Marriage helps us selfish humans to be selfless, or at least a little more selfless, it helps us to think of others before ourselves and to love unconditionally. We don't, love unconditionally that it, but still, a marriage is a better place to try than any other. So, God gives us marriage to teach us a little more about Himself.”

The author, like me, isn’t, or at least at the time wasn’t, married and he, like me, was completely blown away by the idea that you don’t even know your spouse completely. But now I get it. Our goal in life should be to know God fully. God’s goal in our lives is for us to know Him fully. When He sent Jesus down here, it was, among a lot of other things, so that we could know Him more. Know Jesus and you know the Father. Jesus said that! It is in the bible!

Everything that we do, every relationship, every job, every activity, every moment of the day should be done with the desire to know God more. In fact, if you are doing something without that desire, then chances are you are sinning. (Sorry, the big nasty sin word came out, but there isn’t a better option) Chances are you are rebelling against the Creator. I know this because most of my life and actions up to this point have been in rebellion. I know it is rebellion because I am the one doing it. But the times I am not in rebellion, those times are great.

A few months ago, I was getting to know Jesus so much more than ever before. A lot of it was because of that past relationship, the one referenced in the love letter. I was seeking Christ everyday because of it. I was so confused and distraught back then that all I had to turn to was Christ. I would ask Him all sorts of things about why the things that were happening were, and why they weren’t turning out the way I wanted them too. He kept showing me time and time again who He was and how my desires were all wrong. I desired something good, but not something best. He is best; everything else is a distant, been lapped about a million times, second. One of those things that He was showing me was how He uses other people to reveal Himself. That goes back to the quote about marriage.

Marriage and relationships are good things, but if they help you know Jesus more, then they become best things. When I made that connection all those months ago, January to be exact, I made the realization that marriage was good and feasible. Practically today, marriage is of less importance, but the idea is still valid. That connection has helped me to love people more. Jesus calls us to love another. That has always been a difficult task for me because I generally don’t like people. I really like being alone. I used to put up with people because this earth is full of them. As I grew, I went from putting up with them to more embracing them in a hands extended, arms straight, junior high, boy/girl hug kind of way. Now I am in the process of really learning to like people because I love them. Like them so much that I am truly interested in their lives. I am starting to care about them and their situations and their issues and needs and desires.

This bit of traveling has been part of that learning process. I can’t tell you how many times on this trip I have just wanted to isolate myself and not talk to or interact with any people. When that desire comes, some of the time I over ride it and step out and converse. I have even gone as far as to have a whole series of conversations with the same person. I am even going to look some of those new friends up when I get to Heidelberg. That is a big step, but I still have a long ways to go because many times on this trip, I haven’t done that. I have sat next to some dude or chick and not said a word while I kept telling myself, “Say something, say something, idiot, just say something. Start with hi.” As I berate myself, time ticks by and it becomes harder and harder to say anything. And then I just don’t say anything. (Like right now as I sit next to two people and not say a word) I am not sure if I am getting better or worse, but at least I am building character.

Yeah, so this blog has become rather lengthy. Part of it is not my fault, it was a long song, but regardless I need to wrap it up. Hopefully I will get around to actually describing the trip itself and not just my thoughts. It has been a beautiful trip and Scotland is wonderful.

Until then and tomorrow.

Jason