Ryanware

Ah, high school! Those were the days! Oh wait, I didn’t go to high school. Whatever. They were still the days. Whatever “the days” really means.

And they really weren’t “the days,” anyway. Who says that about adolescent years? A lot of people, actually.

They were “the days,” if that’s meant to imply that the days were awkward and weird. Because that’s what they were. But only in retrospect.

I’ve seen a lot of photos of my two older sister’s high school days. Whenever I see one I think “wow, I’m glad I wasn’t that awkward.” But then I realize I was. Probably more so, since I was the home schooled kid. Perception plays a big part of awkwardness and telling someone you are ‘home schooled’ makes that perception, whatever this perception is, bigger. The words ‘home schooled’ generally evokes images of anti-social, geeky people learning how to bake bread.

Not that there’s anything wrong with learning how to bake bread. I would have loved doing that. Baking bread smells amazing.

It’s usually delicious, too. Especially with homemade raspberry jam (that you learned how to make while in home school!).

Anyway, eventually you look back on your life and realize everyone was awkward, everyone was geeky. 10 years from now we’ll look back and think we were all sorts of awkward. This means two things: we’re all hopelessly awkward, or we’re not at all. I vote not at all because that means we can all just move on and not worry about what we look like.

So, I’m the guy in the back left of the photo. I don’t remember my date’s name. I remember having a hard time with her name that day, too. It’s weird. I can’t remember her name, yet I see people I saw once 15 years ago I know who they are and what they do. Okay, maybe not to that extreme, but still. My name-remembering ability seems to be mere random coincidence. So if I call you George when your name is, in fact, Sally; I’m sorry. I apologize now.

P.S. I loved my home school experience and wouldn’t trade it for anything. Except, maybe, for large amounts of freshly-baked bread with homemade raspberry jam.

While back East I saw this at someone’s house and had to take a picture.

Why would someone want such a big remote control?

I figured poor eyesight was probably the reason.

I was so wrong.

I realized just how wrong I was when I saw this:

Question answered, problem solved.

1.5 years ago I came across an article in the Washington Post describing, in great detail, a musical experiment. The article is called Pearls Before Breakfast, the experiment was to see if one of the greatest musician’s could distract people from their rush to work in a D.C. Metro station.

The musician behind the experiment was Joshua Bell, an utterly amazing violinist. I read the article (it’s long) in amazement. I wondered what I would have done in the same situation: you’re in a hurry to get to work and hear some amazing music. Do you stop and listen or plow on?

I’ve often wondered “what would I do?” or “what would I have done?”, not only with simple things like this, but with bigger things. What would I have done during the American Revolution? What would I have done if I’d lived in Jerusalem 2000 years ago? What would I have done if I had been the one to discover how to make donuts?

I took this photo on Nov. 1st, underground in the New York City subway. It was late Saturday night, I wasn’t in a hurry, and it wasn’t very crowded. Still, I almost walked right on past. I caught myself and thought about the Washington Post experiment. I stopped and listened for a few minutes. She was good—not as good as Joshua Bell, but good. I’m glad I stopped to listen.

I had a lot of opportunities to stop and listen in New York. Sometimes I stopped, sometimes not. When I didn’t I was either in a hurry or the musician wasn’t that great. I wanted to stop whenever the musician was good, and tried to listen as long as possible even if I didn’t feel like I could stop.

While questions like “what would I have done?” are important, they’re much less important than the here and now. I believe that one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves is “what will I do?” I’ll never know how I would have acted had I been in that D.C. Metro station that day, but I can decide what to do in similar situations. The key is remembering what we’ve decided when the moment arrives.