I quote from a book, "It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine."
Spent time with my mother tonight, have been doing so for a bit this past week. She invited me to go see a movie with her. She did so last night but I didn't go due to work.
(To get side-tracked, I accepted a job opportunity that I will be quitting come Monday. What is going on with my life? Everything has been topsy-turvy since returning from Taiwan back in the Summer of 2010. What am I doing? Who am I wanting to be? I knew not for the longest time those answers...I still don't. I am lost, wanting to figure out these questions. My brother asked me the question mid-December, "what is it that you are wanting? What are you trying to find?" My only reply was, "I wish I knew." And with that he was dumbfounded. "What do you mean you wish you knew?" "I'll tell you when I find out." I decided to not attend Winter semester for university. I gave up during Fall semester, wondering what my purpose was, what is it all for. This realization has been in the making and finally has revealed itself within the Fall semester and now. I was unsure. Firm footing I had none, I was free-falling to somewhere, somewhere I didn't know. A weak version of me has been displayed for a long time, and I am trying to find my mind, and myself. Who I am now is not what I want, but I wish to see myself as a strong version of me)
This night I went with her to the movies. We began watching Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows but she wanted to watch War Horse an hour into the film. I didn't complain, my mother wanted time with me, I was going to give it to her. War Horse made me extremely emotional, yet it had nothing to do with the characters or the main protagonist itself.
War.... The rape of the Earth. The work of death spreads through all men like a mad virus. Hell brought to man's eyes. Oh! the sadness of man! The plight of our creation. Who is man when in war? What is man when in war? In front of war-worn man lies the abstraction that is Death. Sadly, Death's messenger delivers the message and sees the same abstraction, a representative of Death. How? How could you kill a fellow being? Don't you see you and I are the same? Our skin colors may be different and we may speak a different language, but do we not have hair? Two eyes? Two hands? A mouth? Feet? Do we not breathe in the same air!? And yet with all these similarities, we kill because we are not the same nationality, same religion, same mentality, same brotherhood. Hitler, as atrocious as he was, resonated truth to his saying, "how fortunate for leaders that men do not think." There was a time when I looked at war as something that was grand, that it was a respected title to have, Soldier. Now, I am terrified by war. It scares me. Never do I want to see the hand of man rip open the cavity of the human soul, and tear their life away, that life which was a vessel for good and progression, if taught correctly. It was those scenes of war that caused me to shun my eyes with my tears because of sad destruction that filled the screen. Humans became animals. The polar opposite of a God degraded to a devil, a monster, an animal.
"We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down---now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged."
This. This sad realization that man is meant for noble stature defeated by the mass genocide of the human race. Then, midst the sadness that is war, camps switch and you begin to witness the German front. Two brothers enter, one brother with the promise made to his mother that he'd protect his younger brother, the other with the desire to please his father. War ravishes between France and Germany and soon the orders are given, separate the two; young one to the front, the older stay behind. Here is when I couldn't contain myself. "NO! NO! DON'T YOU REALIZE HE WILL DIE!? AN ORDER TO THE FRONT FOR THE GERMANS IS A DEATH SENTENCE...and they will all never see those whom they loved...." I was in pain for them. Life, taken within an instant. Their deaths glorifies Destruction. Then, this quote deepened my pain, etched along my heart and soul the grooves that causes me to sympathize,
"Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and that same dying and the same agony---Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother.... Take twenty years of my life comrade, and stand up---take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now."
Who am I? What am I? Why am I? Where am I? Why? Why? Why!? I didn't go to work Saturday. They called but I never answered nor responded. Reckless, I know. But hey, now I can say I have done it. I accepted the job! It sounded too good to be true, and my brother's words rang back to me now, "if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably isn't." The man made promises, guaranteed, yet when the time came for getting things done, it never happened. I wanted to make something happen, but for the man, tomorrow, tomorrow. Then I realized, I don't want to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. On top of that, I was offered $1,600/month. Do the math, that's a little less of $5.50. What did I get myself in? Yeah what he offered to me sounded wonderful, amazing! Regional Manager, but that's if I stayed with him. Then I saw and questioned, how was he going to provide for me when he wasn't even providing for himself? Then, when he began to fill certain contracts, he asked me how to spell and wanted to know if that looks right and if that is how it should be filled. I have pity, he never went through elementary, yet he could have, but chose not to. Soon, I would be hearing stories of families leaving, being broken, adultery and divorce. Then a customer comes in and tells of similar stories---less than an hour before that my step-mother called to inform me that she would be divorcing my father. Shock surged into my mind, no comparison can be made to the speed of such. I was tired of hearing such, the world that I envisioned was marred by the reality weak men and women have made (but even the strong fall). I hate it all! Why the destruction of something that is so precious to me, the family? Will I no longer witness the calamity but live to tell about it in the future? NO! I will not! I will fight! I will fight for my family because the family is so dear to me! I don't want to live through such, not again. Then the man says, "you all are talking, but I wan'a hear from him. He's been quite the whole time." I didn't respond. I was incapacitated, but I was conscious. My arms folded. What do you want to hear from me? You blame it on the women, but aren't men at fault here too? Where was the unity that was supposed to exist? Where did it all crumble and turn wrong? I have decided, I will look for a 9-5 job; my family is too precious too me and if I have to sacrifice what I want for the stability and protection of my family, so be it! I want my time with my family! My family is precious to me and I will see to it that it is not ruined but protected. Maybe it's because of that, men leave their wife unattended to for hours on end (here for example, 12 hours, the boss does more) that leave their wive's deprived of company, love, of a help-meet. But women! Why play with such inhibition? Is it sexist to say that married women should avoid working? I have seen married women give in to the advances of their co-workers, and now a family lies dead in memories. Who is safe? Am I sexist when I want the protection of the one I love?
I left my work, but how I miss learning. That time I worked, after seeing the state of a man, of work filled with hours away from family, sunk in me that I miss learning and I want an education. Now I learn, though I am away from school. I have started to learn Accounting. Who knows, it could be of benefit in the future. Books that were kindly left behind have become my University. What those books contain perhaps will open my eyes, will feed a soul that is starving for knowing himself. Who is Philippe Valer? Like Ayn Rand writes, "who is John Galt?" I am unlearned in the ways of knowledge, of literature. I have damned myself near the end of elementary when I decided not to read again...how I used to read in the past. Give me a book, I would read. 1,000 page books were exciting to me. Wisdom contained in different pages, a new world to be had. I blame it all on Harry Potter (I shouldn't have followed it, because those were the last books I read before I said that I don't want to read), but what's the point on putting a scapegoat? I have damned up an education for myself by not reading. I am unlearned. I am not cultured, as I have been taught by my mother, "be cultured." I have no position, I have no stance. "Give me something; tell me this, tell me that, I will piece together what you say". I am a walking opinion of others. Where was my voice? I have none. When placed next to others who are cultured, well read, I am put to shame, shame because of the time I wasted, of a perfectly good opportunity that I could have taken advantage of but didn't. I write now, I write with my heart. It helps to let my heart do the talking, though I find myself to not be good at it, there are others whose writings I cherish in because of how powerful they write. I don't know any other way of writing. I told my mom that I write, that I will write poetry and what not. She told me that she is not surprised, that she knew that I had something for it. She then told me that she used to write to, that she wrote a fairly large collection of poetry (compiled into a book) while she was living in Peru, but she threw it away. She threw it away because her family, especially her mother would ridicule her, and most likely punish her. "Perhaps that is where you got your want for writing. Perhaps it came from me." I got my want for writing while serving a mission, but over the past semester it was opened unto me.
My life has been spiraling down since I returned back from Taiwan in 2010. How could this be? Having had the opportunity to serve a mission for the LDS church, I have arrived to the conclusion that you should lose yourself (lose yourself in the work of serving others, forgetting about yourself and only care for others), that when you lose yourself, you find yourself. I believe it. So why do I say I have not found myself, that I do not know who I am? I have found myself with regards to the mission that I am a child of God, the son of a King and Creator. I have found myself that I am nothing without God, that I would not be able to accomplish much were it not for the Atonement. I have found myself in relation to others around me, that I am merely a brother to others, a vessel of love to a family so real yet we quite don't fully grasp it. In Gospel sense, I have found myself.
So what do I mean when I say I have to find myself, that I am lost and falling to somewhere I don't know. This, who is Philippe Valer? Who is this person that is me? What am I? Why am I? What am I doing here? This all began half-way through the mission I served as I studied President Kimball's "Miracle of Forgiveness" where he begins to talk about the mind. Then, he recommended the book, "As a Man Thinketh" to the which I have now read. The mind of man, the possibilities of man, the potential of man. Man is made for something great (thus why I am ashamed of my lack of knowledge around others who are learned). But the more I learned, the more it took possession of me, the more the thoughts of inquisition, who am I? Like Gautama, I plan on pursuing my journey of enlightenment, though different in nature. I don't seek to find Nirvana, I don't seek anything of the sort. Though it seems that this is Spiritual, I can't neglect the Spiritual with my Physical. Everything about me will be questioned. I don't go to have fun. I am not going on a vacation. This is purely a pilgrimage to me. It may seem rash, but this is something that I have thought of for a long time...now...now is the time to take advantage, to seize it before it slips. I plan on returning to school come April, and I have but a few months to do this, but everything now is in position for this. Shut the world behind me, I will return, but let me find myself before I am able to be of help to you.
