I lack compassion. I think that's what it is.

I've taught myself how to superficially care about people, how to ask them about their day or carry on a nice conversation and say all the right things to make both parties feel good about their lives. I've learned how to be a good host, and how to be friendly to strangers. I can buy lunch for the homeless people living on the street. I like to donate money to good causes.

But I still lack compassion. Compassion is a human thing, and humans are unique creatures in the sheer range of their emotions. I don't have a very wide range of emotions. I am not easily moved. It's like a shell that both protects and imprisons. Stuck inside, safe from the outside. It's a scary world out there, isn't it?

No, out there. Not the job market, not the big city, not adulthood. Outside of America. In Cambodia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Haiti, North Korea, and Colombia, where the children die of hunger while their mothers are beaten and raped. Where dictatorial regimes restrict their people's rights maybe not even because they want to, but because they have no other choice. Where the future of people our age is not college, grad school, and then a comfortable job with a steady income, but ... nothing. Their future is fear, uncertainty, disease, and death.

Hard to make that sound like a reality and not another stupid cliché.

You know, I never did consider myself the activist type. I never did much community service in high school; I continue to avoid similar organizations at Swarthmore. The thing is, I do my small share of good for my world and then move on. Life generally sucks. Mine doesn't, not so much; so much have I been given, so much should I give back. That's all. No need to throw away what God has blessed me with to spend my life Promoting A Cause. Right?

But what God gave me... blessings like life, health, education, a loving family, wonderful friends, intelligence, perseverance, and acuity. That seems to be all I need in order to... go. Out there. Use my hands and my mind and make change. Not the kind of change that supports a family or gives you a month of vacation every winter.

We all know that there is a need out there, but there is precious little that we do about it.

And I don't have enough compassion to leave what I have to go do more than that precious little.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't know what I'm doing right now. I'm in college, taking a break before my second semester of freshman year begins. I'm going to take classes in French, Chinese, Religion, English Literature, and Biology. I'm going to play volleyball, take photos for the school newspaper, and try out for the dance team, maybe do orchestra as well. I'm going to be a college student. Just another college student. I don't envision myself changing anything.

As my parents were taking me back home from the airport last Thursday, my dad talked to me about grad school. Apparently he has it all planned out for me already. I'm going to graduate from Swarthmore in four years, having applied to several graduate schools in the fall of my Senior year. They will be Oxford and Cambridge, and then as many Ivy Leagues as I can manage - Harvard, Yale, Columbia, all the schools that rejected me last spring - or else another school with "an outstanding program" in whatever I choose to study by then. "That's what your goal should be," he said. I was quiet the entire time.

I don't know what I want to do.

What does God want me to do?

God wants me to go.

Here I am Lord, send me.

Last spring I thought God was sending me to Swarthmore. One semester of half-hearted labor later, I see no fruit. Keep at it?

Only for now.

Four more years. Not a long time. If by then I have no obvious calling to become an obnoxious postgraduate studying Chaucer in England, I am going to pack a bag and go. Somewhere, anywhere. Maybe francophone Africa, maybe rural China or Taiwan, maybe the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Everyone knows about Papua New Guinea. And I'm going to spread God's love and compassion to where it is most needed, to those to whom it has never before been given.

Therefore, I now have seven semesters to develop compassion and a strong enough set of the armor of God so that I won't lose heart in the middle of the battlefield. And in the meantime, if I see fruit here at Swarthmore, that's a good side effect. But the main directive is the world.



Out there.


P.S. I still think this Starfield song is inherently hypocritical. It's like that "Christians don't tell lies, they sing them" kind of thing.

"Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for everyone thinks himself to be so well endowed with it that even those who are the most difficult to please in everything else are not at all wont to desire more of it than they have. It is not likely that everyone is mistaken in this. Rather, it provides evidence that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false (which is, properly speaking, what people call "good sense" or "reason") is naturally equal in all men, and that the diversity of our opinions does not arise from the fact that some people are more reasonable than others, but solely from the fact that we lead our thoughts along different paths and do not take the same things into consideration. For it is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to apply it well."

- René Descartes, Discours de la méthode. The very first paragraph. So simple, yet so profound.

Another excerpt from later on in the same chapter:

"I revered our theology, and I desired as much as anyone else to reach heaven; but having learned as something very certain that the road to heaven is open no less to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths guiding us there are beyond our understanding, I would not have dared to submit them to the frailty of my reasonings. And I thought that, in order to undertake an examination of these truths and to succeed in doing so, it would be necessary to have some extraordinary assistance from heaven and to be more than a man."

I'm studying Descartes in philosophy class right now, and I enjoy it very much.