Foolish Wisdom

“I swear half our class came back medicated.” Probably an over-exaggeration but you get the idea. Let’s be honest for a moment, freshman year of college is a bitch-whether you love it or hate it, it’s always a bitch. If for no other reason than it makes you confront all the emotions and feelings you didn’t want to or weren’t ready to before.
I go to a small liberal arts college that my mother describes as being in the middle of “bum-fuck nowhere.” Personally, for a small Midwestern farming town, this place isn’t so bad. Anyways, back to the point. If you know anything about liberal arts colleges then you know that they have a tendency to attract the artsy-creative people. Now imagine that times about fifty and you’ll get my school. Choir geeks, band geeks, orchestra geeks (yes they are two different things), art geeks, theater geeks-you name it we’ve got it. Combine all of that with ridiculously high levels of intelligence and voila, that’s my college. 
People have  tendency to over emphasize  that aspect of liberal arts colleges-the wacky creativity-and under emphasize the not so pretty side of the student body: we’re all insane. I don’t mean the “you-have-to-be-some-kind-of-crazy-to-go-to-a-liberal-arts-school” crazy (even if you do have to be some kind of crazy). I mean the fact that somewhere from 50-80% (at least at my college) of us are some kind of unstable. Depression, bipolar disorder, autism, asperger’s, dissociative identity disorder, schizophrenia, the list goes on and on. Throw in various combinations of ADHD and dyslexia and you’ve got the mental make-up of a liberal arts college student body. 
Now, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. While we’d never readily admit to the general public that our mental instability makes us as crazy as McMurphey or Chief Bromden, the truth is that we are mad. We’re not stable, we’ll never be stable, and most of us wouldn’t ever want to be. Because being stable would mean losing that insane creativity that brought us to the Liberal Arts in the first place. Being unstable does not mean we’re dangerous, it doesn’t mean we’re harmful to society, quite the opposite really. Look at some the great artistic minds that you admire: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Rossetti, Picasso, Wilde, Hemingway, Swift (no, not Taylor), Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great), Cleopatra, Bly, Hedges, Elizabeth I, Dean, Monroe. If you think any of them were stable, you’re crazier than I am.  So let me pose this question: what exactly is mentally stable, what exactly is sane? Do you know, because I don’t. All I know is this, I’m mad, I live, work, and breathe with a wonderfully, enticingly creative group of people who are just as gone in the head as I am, and the only thing we pose a danger to is our GPA. 
My name is Logan Sage Quinn, and I have Clinical Depression. Do you think I’m mad?

Go n-eírí an bóthar leat,
  Logan

  “The question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or the others crazy?” —Albert Einstein  

Does anyone really know who or what ‘God’ really is? No, they don’t. For those who do assert that there must be some form of ‘God,’ the ‘god’ we each believe in is just that-the ‘god’ we believe in. No one can prove one way or another who or what God is, or that God even exists. The only thing we can state with any certainty is what form of God we, individually, believe in. Personally, I do believe in God but I happen to be of the opinion that worldly religions have been too corrupted by human hands for any one of them to be ‘the one’ religion. The God I believe in is both feminine and masculine-just like all the races of the earth-and does not seek blind adherence form anyone, but rather the desire to be a genuinely good person who seeks not only to improve themselves but the world they are a part of.

Mason Jennings once wrote (and later sang) the words “Jesus, I love you and I love Buddha, too. Ramakrishna, Gurudev, Tao Te Ching and Mohammed.” Jennings starts with Jesus and ends with Mohammed, the central figures of arguably the two religions that have been the loudest in the Spiritual Debate-Christianity and Islam. I have nothing against either religion; I was raised in a Christian family and I have several Muslim friends. But let’s be honest, people have been raising hell on both sides since the Crusades and how many years ago were they? The most oft heard argument on either side has been that the other side believes in a “false God.” I hate to burst anyone’s bubble but you’re talking about the same God. 

Both Islam and Christianity trace their roots back Abraham who, by the way, happened to be Jewish. Which would imply that both sides are talking about YHWH, or “Yahweh.” Now I could bore you to death by explaining how Judaism evolved from polytheistic, to henotheistic, to monotheistic along with what happened to Judaism during the various exiles but I won’t (took a class on that first semester of my freshman year of college, learned a lot but never.again.). The point of all of that was to show just how much religion has changed over the last few thousand years. How can anyone claim to know that their God is the ‘Real God’ when the gods that are worshiped today are not the same as the gods at the origin of the worlds’ religions? Just think about it and maybe you’ll find that the ‘Narrow Road’ isn’t so narrow after all. 

 Go n-eírí an bóthar leat,
     Logan 

“I don’t not believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason and intellect intended us to forgo their use.” -Galileo Galilei 

The long anticipated (and much desired) end of the teenage years never quite seems to be what people hope for it to be. It’s just as awkward and chaotic and incomprehensible as the rest of the teenage years (though hopefully most have reached the point of being able to say ‘I’m too old to think your self-centered drama is cute’ cos it never really was). But the difference between being on the threshold of adulthood and being on the threshold of the teenage years is that when you’re on the threshold of the teenage years you think you know who you want to be and when you’re on the threshold of adulthood you’re beginning to understand that life is something that, as the mere mortals we are, we just don’t get. So, yeah, it’s kind of completely mad, and sometimes there are circumstances you cannot change or there’s some kind of bs that doesn’t work out-so what? Think for a moment, is any of that anything to really complain about? I know better than some that life can suck beyond the telling of it sometimes-I’m not the world’s most stable person (and really just what exactly is stable anyways?). But, as of late, I’ve been thinking-I can either let the circumstances I grew up with (and subsequently people who really don’t mean a damn thing to me) control the rest of my life, or I pick up the pen, take responsibility, and write my own story. Think about this: you’re alive, you’re breathing, you have the ability to make something of your life because you still have one. And that’s a reason to smile, that’s a reason to celebrate. Our stories are ours to write, no one controls the outcome except us. So what story do you want to write? 
Nineteen years after I started writing mine I finally figured out what story I want to write. Or rather whose story. In order to write her story, she needs an introduction to the world stage. The woman I want to introduce revels in the Foolish Wisdom that are the lessons life teaches and always takes the chance to dance, on stage or in the dark. Allow me to introduce my alter ego, Logan Sage Quinn. If you’ll allow me to be that crazy kind of metaphorical that writers love for just a moment, I’d like to explain ‘my’ name. Logan is a Gaelic name meaning ‘hollow,’ Sage is an English name that means ‘wise,’ Quinn is another Gaelic name (it’s meaning-Son/Descendant of Cuinn-is irrelevant. It doesn’t mean much to me, it just fit.) Combining the meanings of Logan and Sage you get ‘Hollow Wise’ or, more loosely translated, foolish wisdom. Logan has little, if anything, to do with the person I was growing up, but I never much liked her anyways (does anybody really like their teenage self in retrospect?). But I like Logan. I like her a lot. And the more I chip away at that shell of a rather off-putting person I somehow became, the more I move towards her. For the first time in my life I have-at the same time-a support system, an idea of a path, and a place where I belong. So I’m taking a a leap of faith and I’m going to see how Logan does in the real world. The next few month will be chaotic, and bumpy, maybe even a little awkward, but I banking on them being a beautiful mess.

 Go n-eírí an bóthar leat,

   Logan

“We should all start to live before we get too old. Fear is stupid. So are regrets.”     —Marilyn  Monroe