I go to Paris every night.

Ah, isn't it marvelous?
What a lush lifestyle I lead...

But let me clarify; it's not the clean, tourist-friendly, manicured part of Paris that I visit each evening. No, it's something much more robust– the seedy underbelly of a north-western Parisian suburb called Sartrouville. The place I go has some real character to it, and not the kind you see in the movies. This place has a story etched in the cracks of aging drywall and graffitied on stone walls older than the country in which I was born. This story was left out of the history books; it was neither glorified nor white-washed nor ironed out and put into picture books to be read at bedtime, followed by tucking in and exchanging bisous.

———

The place I go is where, upon first introductions, people kiss one another on the cheek; my temperament flourishing in this new, platonic sentiment; the memory of handshakes morphing into something disaffected, unfriendly, cold.

Where everyone smokes cigarettes like the air they breathe; the once-appalling stench becoming strangely familiar— strangely comforting— like the unpleasant, musty spice of your grandpa's basement which carries you swiftly to a place of complete amenity.

Where everything is more petite; the cars, the rooms, the beds, the classes, the people. Where the gaps between meals are unbearably massive, but each time you sit down to dine is an elaborate, prominent event, lasting for hours and hours...

Where the world's best bakery sits happily on each and every city block, the neighborhood stretching out from the scent of fresh baguettes, fearful of establishing itself too far from the captivating smell upon which daily life thrives.

———

With a whiff of cigarette smoke, I'm suddenly descending the filthy, beautiful stairs of the métro, hearing a blind man pour his soul through a tarnished brass saxophone and clutching my purse like my life depended on it.

Each night I catch the scent of my face lotion— the lotion I bought the night before my flight to the country that captivated my heart— and all at once I'm standing in a cramped 4x6 bathroom, emotions soaring, clouded by extreme jet lag, trying to figure out these unusual faucets and worrying that I'm taking too long; 'it's rude to spend too much time occupying the bathroom' I hear Madame Dobernecker saying in the back of my racing mind; I think it's so odd that the toilet is in a different room than the sink; I can't find "I think I have a fever" in my phrase book; wait, what time is it in Ames right now? Oh, what a day it's been; I wonder what we'll have for breakfast...

———

It's a fleeting idiosyncrasy, the ability of a particular smell— more than any other sense— to so rapidly transport you to a different place, a precise moment in time.

If I were God, I swear, I'd be so annoyed with me...

I remember when I was a youngin'.
I thought college kids were SO cool.
They were so adulty.
Independent. Confident. Awesome.
It was like, "Mannnn, I can't wait until I'm that old!"


Welp...
Here I am.
And some days I have to remind myself that I am, in fact, this old.
It's those days — the days when real life sneaks up, whops me on the back of the head and proceeds to run away, giggling — that I ask,
"EY! When did YOU get here?!"
Ridiculous, really — I've spent so much time in the last few years sitting around, praying and asking God for things. Telling Him I'm ready for this and that; ready to be used by Him and ready for real life to begin. As though I knew better than He what I was and was not ready for; as though 'real life' was something I hadn't yet entered.....

He waited patiently for the day that I finally realized I wasn't in control; the day when I willingly handed over the reins to the One who actually knows what the destination is. It was on this day that I realized that I was far better off trusting in the Author of the universe with my story than trying to feebly construct something of beauty on my own— and oh, what a day it was.

(a Tuesday, I think...)

Up next was the period in my life where I asked God what the plan was. I had acknowledged my lack-of-control-ness; I was now ready for whatever He had in store. The mildly satirical summation of my mindset was as follows:

"Hey, God. I have no control over anything; You've completely got it covered. You're awesome and powerful and loving and in control and all that stuff. Mmm."
*thoughtful pause*
"So. Since I fully trust you now and everything— where exactly are we going?"

Sarah Thvedt has given me some pretty brutal colloquial beatings to this effect.
I've grown to love it.
I've also grown from it; I've seen my capricious faithlessness and realized it takes more than that to truly hand my life over to my Creator.

And some days I feel peace about leaving my life in God's hands. Some days I worry about the future and where I'm headed. Some days I feel ready to take on the world and I wish He'd hurry up and let me in on the agenda. Some days I feel entirely inadequate for the tasks at hand.

Each and every day I feel blessed to have my life in His hands.

My God is a god who guides.
My God is a god who is in control.
My God is a god who has a perfect plan.
My God is a god who gives me everything I need.
My God is a god who knows the right timing for everything.
My God is a god who loves me despite my constant second-guessing.
My God is a god who is way more patient with me than I would be with myself.

...Thank God.

A change of major.

I've mused over this for quite some time.
And decided I don't want to get a teaching degree. Not anymore—

I'll teach for the rest of my life.
I couldn't stop that if I wanted to; it's what God has gifted me with.

Now, our system has produced plenty of wonderful teachers.
And there are those who will do brilliant things with teaching degrees.

But I don't think I could handle it.
I feel like my passion would be crushed by our educational system.

I don't want to submit to it;
if I do I feel like it'll use me to squander my students' potential.

I'd spend my career longing for something more.
Searching for what I'm missing, lacking the freedom to see it realized.

Have we really found the most effective way to utilize gifts and passions?
Have we really reached the plateau of education in our country?

Bubbling up from my core is an emphatic, resounding, "No."
It echoes through the whole of society.

I want to tear down presuppositions about standardized, systematic learning.
I want to break it apart and reveal it's flaws.

More than that, I want make it better.

I want to change what learning looks like.
I want to reform how our society views education.

I'm filled with an inexplicable desire.
There's a fire burning within me.

I can't put it out.
I don't want to.

If you like muffins...

This essay was my final paper in a humanities class. 

It is obnoxiously long for a blog post; I am aware of this.

It pretends to be deep, but I'm quite confident that my feeble three hours of working on this paper did not produce any profoundly groundbreaking thoughts which I am morally obligated to share with mankind.

This is just for your amusement, if you are, in fact, looking to be amused.

So, if you're familiar with René Descartes... Or you enjoy pondering the nature of God and the universe... Or you feel like subjecting yourself to four pages of philosophical rhetoric.... Well, then this blog post is for you.

Knock yourself out:

Prompt: Descartes offers several proofs of God’s existence. Evaluate his proofs. What would count as success for Descartes? If you think Descartes is successful, what is the concept ‘God’ that Descartes is employing?

René Descartes was a rationalist philosopher. The rationalists wanted to prove everything by reason alone, because they thought that 'the senses' were unreliable. Generally, people tend to think that the existence of God can only be proven by using both senses and reason, but Descartes' attempted to logically prove the existence of god with reason alone. One can build arguments against in his theories, but I have concluded that Descartes presents valid, successful reasoning.

René Descartes spent significant amounts of time considering human knowledge, and in doing so he attempted to whittle down extraneous, circumstantial human understanding to find the things that he could know for sure. He discarded all the wisdom, understanding, and information he had gained from his experiences and his senses, which he had deemed untrustworthy, and discovered that he knew essentially nothing at all. He doubted every bit of knowledge he thought he had, everything except his very existence. The reasoning behind this was that, because he doubted, he could be at least sure that a being who doubted had to exist. He could be certain that he himself was in existence. This is the meaning behind Descartes' famous saying: 'Cogito, ergo sum.' — 'I think, therefore I am.'

After arriving at this premise, Descartes ventured to prove the existence of a god. His proofs can be simplified and summarized as such: First: I exist. Second: in my mind there is the notion of a perfect being. Third: an imperfect being, like myself, cannot think up the notion of a perfect being. Fourth: therefore, the notion of a perfect being must have originated from the perfect being himself. Fifth: a perfect being would not be perfect if it did not exist. Sixth: therefore, a perfect being must exist.

So is Descartes' reasoning sound? Does this argument irrefutably prove to us that there is a god? I think we can all agree that the first point is valid. We can all be sure of our own existence. No one argues that they don't exist; if they did, they wouldn't be there to argue their opinion anyway.

The second proof, however, is not as irrefutably true as the first. It is apparent that Descartes had an idea of a perfect entity in his mind. I find that I am in the same position as he, but there are certainly people in the world who don't have this kind of idea. What are they supposed to believe? Should they assume that, because Descartes and myself believe there is a god, God exists and simply failed to put that idea into their minds? Or should they make the assumption that a belief in a god is not the innate, natural position that Descartes thought it was? It is very evident that not everyone in the world has this idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving god. Many Christians actually believe that mankind is not capable of conceiving and grasping the idea of God. This seems to be in direct conflict with Descartes' belief that everybody has this idea of a perfect being from birth, yet this Christian belief does not contradict Descartes' view; it supports it. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, "He has set eternity in the hearts of men; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end." So all people, while incapable of fully comprehending God—though some do more than others—have an inner longing for something that lasts beyond this life. This idea carries over to support the Descartes' third point.

He postulates that an imperfect being, such as himself, would never be capable of thinking up the notion of a perfect being. When I make blueberry muffins, I'm under no delusion that the muffins think about me. Yet I can conclude even more decisively that they aren't thinking up a mystical creature that invented them. They aren't thinking at all; they're muffins. Now, if when I was making them I had sprinkled into the batter a teaspoon of imagination, that might be more plausible. But it isn't within the power of the muffins to acquire such an imagination; that ability rests with the baker—me—assuming I possess, somewhere in my kitchen, a jar of imagination without which baked goods of any kind could not hope to fathom myself, the Easter Bunny, or any notion of what happens after they've been chewed up and swallowed. The point is this: the ability to imagine lies in the creator, and the creator alone. This is something Descartes recognized. If creation has the capacity to imagine things, it is imperative to understand that that ability could have only been given by a Creator. This brings us to the fourth and fifth pieces of his argument.

The fourth and fifth points present very simple and valid lines of logic, which are congruent with all previous proofs. If one logically reaches the conclusion that an imperfect being could not imagine perfection without the idea of perfection, or eternity, having been placed in the imperfect being's mind, the next practical resolution is that perfection must, in one form or another, exist. To try to reason the acquisition of a notion of God that didn't come from God is to attempt a rather vast leap in reasoning; how else could a flawed being fathom perfection? Furthermore, in response to the fifth postulate, how could something be perfect that does not exist? Existence is a necessary attribute of a perfect being; existence is a necessary attribute of anything. This is backed up in the reasoning of the first, second, and third postulates and reflected in Descartes' view of our knowledge derived from experience. 

Descartes successfully builds a logical argument to prove the existence of a god. He does not succeed in determining which god, specifically, but instead the inherent truth that a perfect being does exist. He succeeds in that he is able to reach a conclusion not from senses or knowledge gained from experience, but merely from the nature of existence itself. This is the essence of his reasoning. Like any conclusion reached using Descartes method, the understanding and acceptance of each piece of this puzzle is crucial in grasping the theory as a whole. Pascal reminded us that this is the most important conclusion we can reach; as C.S. Lewis said, "Christianity, if false, is of no importance and, if true, is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important."