Finals Class Presentation

Yesterday you presented your final project to the class, nervous, shaking, resolute. The past few days you had been thinking that you would, so to speak, initiate an experiment with the status quo, engaging in a conflict with yourself and the environment. While it was natural for you to avoid the class presentation, thought- anxious and erratic, you repeatedly came back to a purposive narrative, motivating sources that helped you through. Throughout the week you held on to a rather fantastical thread of thought: 1. That if you went through with it, you would be usurping from the ground up a great deal of those destructive habits of social approach/avoidance and 2. That after the presentation you would disclose your attraction to Vanessa, saying that you want her to know you and that you want to know her. This image gave you a kind of overcoming feeling, a resolve of warmth – you would soon be able to hold, feel, touch, and talk softly.

Another aspect of the narrative emphasized your grade situation. You have just been accepted into Humboldt’s philosophy program for fall 2011. You may have not passed your Statistics class. You are, as it is, on the first degree of academic probation for failing the majority of your courses at the college last time you attended (about a year and a half ago). If you do not pass half of your classes this time around you will only be allowed to take nine credits for spring 2011, as a result of the second degree of academic probation. If you are to attend Humboldt in spring 2012, deferring your position a semester as you have planned, you will need to have completed 10 more units not including the classes that are in progress now. (You wish to get a job and work from next summer until you attend Humboldt next spring so that you will have some money and not have to get a job right away in Arcata or a nearby town.) So from this you have determined that passing your life management class is necessary – that is, completing the final assignment and presenting it to the class would allow you to make possible the project that you have set in motion.

Another motivating factor not mentioned thus far was the desire to get across your ideas about Hyrum Smith and about the helpfulness of at-hand trajectory awareness. Its curious to you that Smith does not criticize a culture in which the self is so easily foreign to itself. Does he not find that the socializing processes encourage diffusion? Does he not observe the ‘invisible communities’ role in the individuals floundering? You get the impression that he is aware of this type of stuff. Smith talks about how in developing his time management company how he was at the receiving end of a lot of confused looks from his friends, having turned down a respectable executive job and attempting to begin what became Franklin Quest Company. Throughout the book he makes references to people who go against the ‘tide’ and follow, trustingly, their ‘dreams’. He mentions Ben Franklin as an example – even goes so far as to name his company after him. He distributes anecdotes about Franklin throughout his book, pointing out Franklin’s project to practice a morality, and so on. For Smith, Franklin is the role model for ‘individuals’; and it is ‘individuals’ that Smith wishes to cultivate. From this vantage, it is clear that there is no need to deride the culture for the culture is not responsible, cannot be responsible – really it is always the ‘individual’ that is responsible. At the end of the day you agree with this. It is something Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff would also agree with. They would only wish to add that real individuals are very few and far between, and that most are so conditioned or asleep that their movements are not really theirs but that of their cultures.

The reason for your pause here on this ‘individual’ business is because this is the type of self-fashioning that time management programs have as their goal. Perhaps morality is impossible without a goal at its source. What you think is off in Smith, however, is not pointing out the complexity that exists between the person and the attractiveness of the ‘invisible community’, which is Smith’s name for the social narrative in your mind. You like that he stands for the trusting of the self and its authentic potential, you don’t so much like that he doesn’t address the difficulty of sifting through the layers and layers of the self, discarding what is not self, that is, what is put in there by convention, and keeping what is self, that which is beyond convention.

You spend most of the week leading up to the final in distraction, that mode in which stress is sucked away by attempting to forget the project that seems to be producing the stress. You are stressed not only by the life management presentation but also by your statistics class: you have to make up homework and then take a test that will decide if you pass or fail the course. You end up not completing the homework even though you had plenty of time. When you sit down to do it you don’t care about any of what is being taught and subsequently can’t follow it. On Monday evening you take the final – perhaps getting a ‘C’ on it. You go up to the teacher and ask what your grade in the class was before you took the final. He thinks a ‘D’ and says that you should hope for the best.

On Tuesday you shuffle about and don’t really begin working on the final until around 7pm. You meticulously write down a hierarchy of your value system, begin an analysis of why you value what you do, and to garner a few extra points you begin an assignment on goals that you never turned in. You work hard for several hours. In fact, you come to realize that you are not even forcing yourself to do the work. Completing it is meaningful to you. Although you occasionally felt anxious about the presentation coming up, tranquility filled the background. You go to sleep around 4am and set an alarm for 8am – you’ve got to finish some of the essay on the origin of your value system as well as the goals assignment. You feel pretty awful in the morning, however, when you awaken. You eat and shower and sit down to write. You decide to sleep for another hour because you don’t seem to be able to say anything meaningful. You lie down for a bit but that doesn’t work – too much anxiety. So you go on a jog. This wakes you up a bit, gives you a slight control. You re-shower and finish up the work as far as possible. You sit in meditation for about ten minutes before you print out what you have completed and drive to school.

You end up going next to last – the teacher goes alphabetically. There were periods when you would shift about in your seat while thought and feeling were quick and biting. You rewrote, added to, and amended your script notes while the other students delivered their presentations. You would sometimes feel paralyzed: veins running with adrenalin, stomach clenched tight, breath shallow, cold. Sometimes you would feel comforted with an impression that would occasionally arise: that those to whom you would soon speak were in fact only wishing you the best. You would attempt to feel out and feel with this image. You would come back to it when the velocity and momentum of thought-anxiety would get away from you. Some of the presenters’ dealt solace while others accelerated thought-anxiety.

After doubt and escape thinking had ran its course a few times over and you had noticed its tide eating away your grounded resolution, you initiated an attempt at showing yourself the purpose of sticking it out. Why suffer through it? Really you just didn’t want to feel incompetent anymore, withdrawing, pushing the self away. Not going through with it seemed destructive to the self. This quote surfaces: ‘If you wish to improve yourself you must be content to look stupid.’

You write this on the top of your paper along with the praise ‘keep presence’. Stay with that healthful movement that remains uncorrupted by thought-anxiety, that knows that its okay to look stupid, knows it’s meaningful to be you and fail. You write that you will start the presentation with two self-disclosures. The first is a disclosure that standing up in class and presenting your work scares the hell out of you but that you are trying and please bear with me. The second is a disclosure that you had planned on saying already; that initially you had selected the time management project but had not managed your time effectively, and, lacking time, you completed the value-programming project. You hope people with laugh at this part – that you did not manage your time effectively to do the time management project. You imagine this will break some of the tension.

You get up and deliver as best as you can. You speak up when asked. You try to say everything that your script covers. You find yourself filling in the gaps of the script occasionally, but you don’t think it comes out well. That’s okay, though. You look down at your script most of the time. At the end you’re asked a few questions by the class. You’re asked what some of your governing values are. You point out ‘self-directedness’, vitality, and to ‘care for yourself’. When asked you explain that caring for yourself is just a complicated way of saying that you will practice radical self-honesty. When you’re answering this last question you have difficulty figuring out how to summarize ‘care for self’. You mean liberating the self from destructive and ‘sleep’ or ‘conditioned’ oriented thinking. You mean practicing techniques that bring the self in touch with itself. You mean being mindful of your circumstance. But you don’t say any of this because when you pause to think you feel you’ve paused too long – you were losing concentration and presence and you didn’t breathe. This stuff takes practice. When someone asks if you noticed any connection to your values as they are and the conditions of your upbringing you point out how you are not a very assertive person, how you often come to the role of mediator in your family and that therefore your needs tend to go undressed. Candia says something about you being a good writer near the end. At some point she asks about motivation: you say you do not care about something if you’re not motivated. Candia worries about this. Later you say you’ve appreciated the helpfulness of goal-orientation when someone asks about what you will take away from the project. When you walk back to your seat, you don’t look at the people clapping. Afterward you wish you had, for it would have been good to look everyone in the eye. Vanessa says good job. You smile at her.

There is only one more presentation after yours. You notice that there is a thought that urges you to feel incompetent due to your obvious nervousness up in front of everyone. But you’re proud of yourself like you haven’t been in a long time.

You hand Candia your severely late goals assignment. She hopes that you commit to caring for yourself; only she says it in a sort of shy way, smiling like Nana does.

Outside you wait for Vanessa. There are autumn yellow leaves on the damp ground from nearby trees. You stand in the courtyard thinking that this is nice. She comes out after a while and asks whom your waiting for. You say, you.

You talk back and forth about class and if we are going to use any of the skills we’ve learned. You say you might plan your days and utilize goal-orientation. When you get to where you usually wait the bench is cold and wet. You remove your bag and wipe down it down to soak up the water and so we can sit down. She says you don’t have to do that. Now your bag doesn’t want to be your bag. You sit down but she doesn’t.

You talk about Christmas break, speaking Spanish, last time we talked, how nervous we were in front of the classroom. Some buses pull up and a bunch of high school kids come line up in front to go see a play inside the theater. She asks if we could go over where it’s quiet. You two sit down on a bench underneath a tree. You talk about movies, favorite comedians, westerns, Shakespeare, the Narnia series. She mentions how odd it is to become mentally unbalanced, how just a few absent chemicals and you lose it. You talk about how you used to think this way but not anymore. A lot of this type of stuff has to do with ‘gaining control’ of yourself. Her mom pulls up. You both say goodbye. You haven’t said anything about your attraction to her. When she gets in the car her mom waives to you.

She texts you as you drive to Nana and Papa’s house. She says, Thank you for keeping me company. You don’t respond right away because you want to think over what to say. Exhausted on less than 4 hours of sleep and without the anxiety to keep you up you make yourself a tuna sandwich, peel a orange, and pour yourself some grape juice. You put on your headphones and write out what to say to her – its easier to think this way. In the middle of your brainstorming Mom shows up to take Papa to the ear doctor – he has an eye patch on from a surgery the other day. He instructs you on what he wants you to do with all of the leaves once you’ve raked them all up – this being the reason you’ve come over. You don’t mention to Mom your sort of victory.

You send a message to Vanessa about keeping each other company sometime, that you’d like to see her even though you don’t have class anymore. You say you’re not free this Friday but otherwise you are. She texts back that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to hang out on Friday but that we could when school starts up again.

Unfortunately you’ve been getting these kind of mixed signals. You say, Alright, give me a call if you’ve got some free time over the break, take care. She says, okay bye bye merry Christmas.

You rake three bags of leaves up while listening to music. You push the rest into the curb of the street for the street sweepers to pick up later. You’re pretty tired. You feel accomplished, a bit let down, and sweaty.