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The Email...

I've got an email. As crazy as it sounds, I wasn't expecting no email. You know one of those days that you are so heads down into work that you fade everything out. By the time you know it the workday is almost over. That feeling of either being done or not having done enough fills you. Well, I was in such a state when I received the email. It was a short one as well. Just got off work and thought of what I am going to do with the rest of the day. I did plan to go hiking with Emma. But maybe it is too hot outside to even try that. Maybe going to our favorite coffeeshop to catch up on some reading was the right thing to do instead. 

I didn’t have that much time to think because I heard the "ding" sound my phone made. I never set my phone on sound-on. It feels like ages that I had to turn it up since most of the time I either hold my phone or it is in such a proximity that I can literally see when someone writes or calls me. For some odd reason I decided earlier in the day to play with the side buttons and left it on sound-on. I think my subconscious wanted me to be reached by someone. The “ding” was from that email. For a brief moment I felt like I mattered, I felt like I was in school again and that was amongst the first to be picked during an impromptu soccer match. 

I originally thought it was one of those pesky Spam Callers being blocked by my spam shield. But the icon in my notifications looked different. I press the notification to open it up and I get a call. An actual call. It was Emma, asking if it’s alright if she stops for some errands before coming home. You know women they aren't asking for permission they are just telling you what they are going to do. After agreeing with her further demands I hanged up and go about reading the email. 

It was sent from a weird email address. I don’t think I encountered one like this before. The normal ones have a @ in it. But this one reminded me of the days we played tik tac toe. I always had a strategy when playing it. Placing the first in the center bracket. This will leave your opponent with side picks that you can easily counter. Of course, you could lose or draw a lot in it as well but that’s how you learn. This full email address was “makebetterdecisions#life.com”. It annoyed me for a second. I don’t need a speech from an email address, I received my fair share from my parents while growing up. I can’t count how many times I was lectured for the smallest choices I’ve made to the biggest. They say you are the sum of your choices. But when your choices are constrained by your parents, socio-economic status, your morals, and laws, is your character really modeled by your own decisions or by that of others? 

The subject line read “purpose unknown”. You would imagine that they could catch someone’s attention with something more flashy or urgent. It’s not like every day that a spam email evades the filter and gets thru to me. Ever since I switched to Gmail, I don’t think I ever had problems with spam emails cluttering my inbox. Shameful big corpo plug. They say nowadays that all our data is accessed, shared, and consumed, that we don’t have privacy anymore. Once we click that box that agrees to all the terms and conditions, we basically sell away our information. I did agree so they already know everything about me. 

I thought this might be one of those personally tailored spam emails that might try to sell me something. I was never a fan of tailored relationships, status and now shopping. As a kid I spent a lot of time amongst people of different religions and backgrounds. My best friend was of Austrian heritage, most of my classmates were raised in traditional orthodoxy, while my family was Pentecostal. Then I came to the US and that environment changed even more. I got exposed to so many different things that I could never be the kind of guy who likes to fit into a pattern. 

I scrolled quickly to the body of the email and to my surprise it was empty. Why would someone go thru all the trouble writing me an email just to say nothing? It’s counterproductive. I remember at least a handful of times where I would get someone’s attention and then forget what I wanted to talk to them about. You get all pumped up about a subject, an action, a thought or even the smallest of ideas and then when it comes time to make them shine, they drop off. 

If only I can remember why I started writing this down, why is this received email so important to many of you who read this. Could it be that we become so absorbed in information that we want the find out everything immediate and fast? We stopped and lost focus on what really matters. We never pause to think how fortunate we are to be where and who we are today. 

You don’t need a story about an email to catch our attention, especially one that was never sent to me. You create more interesting stories about yourself every day that you are alive. Focus on living the stories not reading about them. Although you should read mine since they are really good time wasters.

-k4ppu

A nudge in the right direction…

The more I go through life the more I notice how the world seems to be heading in the wrong direction. I’ve noticed this in my own life as well as others. We do tend to make life hard for others. The thought that sparked this post was me having fun at someone’s expense. I noticed how easy it is to make fun or to damage someone just by word of mouth. Sometimes rightfully, sometimes falsely. But is it ever ok to talk badly to someone?

I have never received a lecture for bad talking to someone before this particular event. From my perspective I was mocking someone rightfully and never thought it not to be right. It is interesting to see how someone bringing something to our attention makes us reevaluate our character. As if someone bringing it to my attention wasn’t enough, I had encountered a random video in which someone said that if your laughs come at the expense of others and not yours then you are just a bully. Now I’m not one to take it to heart or to please every sensitive person I encounter but I do know what the bible says about the weight our words carry.

It’s harder and harder to find someone whose character isn’t tainted in your world. Someone whose soul is pure, speech truthful and actions faithful. But even if we can’t find someone that doesn’t fit these perfect characteristics, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive to fulfill them ourselves. So, going forth I will try to watch how I make fun of situations not to overstep the decency boundary and mock someone.

But enough about me. What about society nowadays? It feels like the more you want to set yourself straight the more you seem to set yourself apart. If you want to do a good job you become elite, the better you want to do the worse it seems to turn out, the truthful your speech is the more irritating you become. So how are we to live in this world in which living a rightful life is frowned upon? Are we to live to the constraints society places on us or are we to guide our lives towards a higher standard? 

I found an interesting discovery once I came to the US and that is the way the laws are broken down from the federal, to state, to local jurisdictions. The federal laws tend to be broad and less strict than state and local laws. If a state wants to change a certain law, it is not able to do that without imposing a stricter understanding than the federal and if a local law is changed it needs to be stricter than the federal and state law. If they change a law to be broader than the previous level of the law, it enters in illegality on a state or federal level. Now that the lesson in policy is over, I would like to apply the same principle to how lives should be guided.

When we live our lives, we should follow God given principles and laws. The church in turn should follow the same principles and laws and only make them stricter if changing them at all. Then in turn our own laws and principles should be formed on the basis of God then church and finally individually. We could always assume that church rules or individual ones might be wrong but we could never say God given rules and principles to be wrong.

I know most of the things I write about are abstractions and that we might not guide our lives according to that. We are humans and we are flawed. We break our own rules, the churches, the states, the country’s, God’s. We are not perfect and probably never will be. But I do like to think that every now and then we will hear a voice, encounter a situation, break a rule which consequences will make us rethink our decisions, correct them and change our future approach for the better. 

-k4ppu