Apathy and Anesthesia

I have loved college. I'm not graduated yet, but the end seems to be approaching with haste. As it nears, I find myself reflecting on what my college experience has been like. In the quietest moments of reflection, I'm overcome with awe. All the individual experiences of excitement and joy, laughter and love, grief and pain, peace and upheaval, they all have been used by God to bring me to where I am today. I wouldn't trade any experience, good or bad, because they were all a part of the whole.

I don't know what the rest of life holds, but I imagine that there are many aspects of college life that I won't see anywhere else. Will there ever be another time in life so full of self-discovery? Will I ever belong to another group of people so idealistic and so open to the world? Not to say everyone's lenses are oh so rose-tinted. It's interesting to me the way that cynicism and apathy are celebrated. I think that such attitudes are often just a way of distancing oneself from the pains of life.

It's a concept that we're all familiar with. Have you ever been really excited for a movie that was coming out? I was invited by a friend to see the midnight premier of Spiderman 3, and in the weeks prior I started to get pretty hyped up. The night of, I donned my Venom shirt as we went to the theater. If any of you saw that movie, you can probably guess that I was not quite so ecstatic by the end of the film. This let down, in addition to the crushing disappointment that was the Eragon movie, taught me to be careful about looking forward to movies. If I don't expect much from a movie, I won't be disappointed when it isn't any good.

Now take that basic logic and apply it to life as a whole. What you get is a person who has learned that the best way to avoid pain is to not care in the first place. This defense mechanism is effective in avoiding pain in the way that anesthesia is effective when you get a cavity filled. You remove yourself from a majority of the pain, but you also remove yourself from all other sensation. We all do this at some level, and there is a wise way to separate oneself from pain. But I also know that this is possibly the most slippery slope that has ever existed. If a practice of separating oneself from pain turns into a lifestyle and a mindset, you can live life without actually living. I would argue that if you don't allow yourself to hope for good things or to love others for fear of being hurt, you're avoiding life altogether. This is the hardening of the heart and the walking dead.

I say these things from experience. In the past couple years I've had seasons of apathy and mediocrity -- the grayest of grays. Upon reflection, I can see how those times directly followed times of great struggle and pain; I was reacting to that pain by trying to never feel it again. But looking back, the seasons of apathy have been my absolute worst times in recent memory. In hardship, I was learning, growing, and was deeply aware of my dependence on God. In times of gray, I break ties with the God who encourages me to engage with my pain, I distance myself from others who might break my heart, and I even distort my relationship with my own self as I ignore the reality of my emotions.

I can say whole-heartedly, that self-protective emotional distance is a far worse option compared to honest interaction with painful trials. But I know that at some point, I will once again choose wrong. And when that day comes along, I know that God will not have forsaken me. Because I have never gotten myself out of the graves of apathy that I have dug, but it has always been God who has jumped into the mud with me to push me out. So time and time again, I will choose death, God will remind me of life and freedom, and I will have grown a little wiser, a little more humble, and a little more like Christ.