We have become experts in grabbing onto someone else to pull ourselves up higher.

The first time I ran three miles, I almost cried when I saw the 7-Eleven up ahead. My lungs ached; my legs felt like a ton of bricks; my heartbeat thumped loud in my ears and mocked the sound of sneakers on concrete. I was acutely aware of every movement, every step forward to the invisible finish line.

It wasn’t a race.

via http://weheartit.com/entry/9898252

But us slow pokes in the back have trouble remembering that. We round the next corner and spot a street sign up ahead.

“Make it to that crosswalk and then, maybe, you can take a quick break.”

And then we pass the crosswalk and refocus on a new landmark. That’s the way life should be handled: as a series of stops we should conquer one at a time. Don’t look too far ahead, kid. You’ll freak yourself out.

Someone should have told us that. Someone should have written us a letter when we were just old enough to read and said that life is a marathon—not a sprint.

Instead, we had to wait until we could grasp the metaphorical concept sung about on the radio and written about in books and challenged in movies. We had to figure it out slowly over time, after we already pressed hard harder hardest toward the end.

To take the 30 seconds to stop and look at where we’re at, who we’re with, what we’re doing, that’s crazy, right?

My senior year of high school, I finally figured out the whole running thing. I’m high strung by nature, but the day I ran my best, the clouds covered the sun and the light breeze cooled my back as I started from the back of the pack and picked the girls off, one by one, like flowers on tree branches as I eased by them. I wasn’t aggressive or laid back; I found a rhythm and I trusted myself.

That’s the way to go through life.

Instead, we’ve turned to vices. A quick cigarette here to ease the nervous jitters. A shot of tequila to make that guy in the corner by the jukebox look worthy enough to take home. And then the invisible ones:

Surveying a room full of strangers and knocking each of them down three rungs on some beauty ladder by tearing apart their bad hair dye job or their orange skin tone or their extra little flab around the waist.

We have become experts in grabbing onto someone else and using them to pull ourselves up higher. In life, in love, in the workplace.

We’ve taught ourselves that the only way out is through. Through holes in hearts and cracks in consistency and the pieces of us that break off when we shed pounds in preparation for bikini season the way dogs shed fur.

Have we forgotten to believe in helpfulness? In buying the box of girl scout cookies from the 7-year-olds dancing and skipping and begging us to pay attention please, oh please, just this once, it’s for a good cause?

All of it’s become extra weight we don’t need to carry around.

We’ve forgotten about connections.

About linking hands and hearts and creating an army of good to battle the bad in our past, present, future. We’re warriors fighting against each other when really, we should band together against the disease and terror and heartbreak that threatens to kill us each and every day.

Have we forgotten to sweep our neighbor’s sidewalk when the leaves fall or the snow piles up? To take in their delivered package on the porch when it’s raining and they’re on vacation?

We forgot about Gandhi. About being the change we wish to see in the world. Instead, we see the face in the mirror transform into the change we should’ve avoided.

The good news is that it’s never too late to get it back. What will you do today to turn it around?

Love Drop: The Aubins

It’s that time of the month again: Love Drop update.

This month’s family has a story that breaks my heart. They always do, but it’s the feeling that’s unexpected, having the rug ripped out from under your feet, that really kills me. We all know that feeling. It’s the worst.

The Aubin family is coping with the loss of their father and husband – Keith. He became paralyzed back in 2003 when a blood clot lodged in his lower spine. In April, he had what seemed like an ordinary nosebleed. But it wouldn’t clot, so he had to go into surgery. Complications arose and he became brain dead. He passed away and has left behind three teenage kids and a wife who expected, with Keith’s history in the hospital, for things to turn out OK.

The Love Drop team is running on turbo speed this month, collecting donations for the family’s rent for the next three months. Their goal is to raise $3,600 by the drop date (June 25). And they are, amazingly, well on their way with more than $2,300 in donations.

If you go to the website, you can make a donation or sign up to have an automatic PayPal payment sent to Love Drop each month. They’ve already totaled more than $40,000 in donations since January 1. Can you even imagine?

It blows my mind.

And as always, if you’re a blogger and you want to spread the love, join the Blogger Network. Or see if you can offer a gift or service.

There’s always room to give. Especially when we’re so close to the goal. You can be the one to push it over the edge.

Here’s a video of the family discussing their dad’s death. If you’re not already swept away, he donated his organs when he died. Paying it forward even after he’s gone. Pretty incredible, right?

We are Generation Y. And we are persistent.

Generation X has set a kitchen timer for us. But when it goes off, we will not smell fresh baked cookies. Instead, it’s a countdown for when they plan to give up, once and for all, on us lovers and fighters.

“My dad said to give it 30 years,” my roommate told me a few weeks ago.

I just stared at her, eyes glazed over. 30 years until what? Until we destroy this world and leave nothing salvageable. Not even a Coke can to recycle.

“I’ve never seen him so upset,” she said. “He’s not a pessimist; he’s a realist.”

Anger rises up in me when she tells me that he said we’re young. That we’re still willing to fight and believe it can be okay. But he’s not. He’s not naïve anymore.

It’s days like that when I stop myself and want to check my pulse. Make sure my blood’s still coursing through my veins. Am I a human being on this planet or an alien beamed down from another world where its inhabitants believe, in a naïve stupor, in their innate ability to change the world?

I’m wondering if he forgot that the world changes every millisecond. That it only takes one small decision to start progress in the opposite direction.

Perhaps I should call the Santa Claus standing outside a Walmart Supercenter on a blustery December afternoon and tell him to pack it in. To stop jingling his bell and holding out a Salvation Army bucket.

“No one’s got any extra money to save the world this year,” I’ll tell him. “Sorry, Saint Nick. Not our fault the economy tanked.”

You really think that’s enough to push a jolly old man in a red velvet suit out of the way so you can enter the store through those automatic sliding doors and race toward the prepackaged, slice and bake cookies?

Persistence, kids. We are Generation Y and we are persistent.

There’s a whole host of Generation Y kids dedicated to changing the world. They’re founding nonprofit organizations, food banks and co-ops. Volunteering at soup kitchens and nursing homes after school. Stacking up hours of selfless love like poker chips for a casino that’s been out of business and run down for years.

And they aren’t getting any credit, because the generation before them threw in the towel. Shut off the stadium lights and decided that it’s better, really, to sit on the sidelines this time around.

Let the new kids screw it all up because at least we don’t have to blame ourselves, right? Why risk injury or putting more into this world?

Have they forgotten that many of them will still be alive in 30 years when this supposed Armageddon sets in?

Perhaps they need a reminder. Would they like us to plaster our efforts on billboards? We already receive mounds of criticism for our constant tweets and status updates. It couldn’t possibly make anyone feel better if we put those tweets to good use, could it?

We’ll continue to fight for a better world and a stronger future because that’s all we know. We are young and wild and free. And thankfully, we don’t listen well. So continue to stack up your wall of doubts and we’ll mindlessly continue onward and upward until we blast on out of this world and back to a planet where working hard for a better life is second nature.

Because believe it or not, we are not all troublemakers.

Education might start in the classroom but it ends in the streets.

my sister doing math homework

Last spring, I got a 4.0. I’m not telling you this to brag or even to suggest to you that it’s possible. In fact, I’m telling you for the exact opposite reason.

For six semesters, it’s been the only number worth memorizing. And at the expense of my sanity and well being.

I was the girl who spent Sunday afternoons in a study corral at the library. Hunched over a statistics textbook, redoing problems until my answer matched the one in the back of the book.

Someone needed to stop that girl. Grab her pencil and textbook. Take them hostage.

Because a spoken word poem about a 9-year-old boy with cancer stopped me dead in my tracks Monday night. And I realized that education is not two numbers separated by a period on my official transcript.

Education is the realization that getting an A-minus is not the end of the world. Because I’m alive and my heart is pumping and there are hundreds of injustices in this world. And I work this hard for what? For a number that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

Tears streamed down my face as I watched the video. Because the girl in the study corral, she missed out on the sun shining outside that day. She missed out on the hundreds of other people in this world with a story to tell and pain in their hearts and nobody put that girl’s actions into perspective.

I used to think education was a classroom full of kids, all in ruler-straight lines of desks, perfect posture and hands folded over hands in laps. Waiting with eager eyes and antsy feet tap-tap-tapping until the bell rang and then silence for 46 minutes.

Education equated to discipline. To perfectly written five-paragraph essays and math tests with no red lines scribbled on them. Grades with three digits.

I want you to know that it’s not true. I have two semesters left. One year. I’ve been in school since I was five years old. That’s 16 years of believing one silly little thing. And it’s not true.

That poem I watched was just the first of a whole stampede of experiences and ideas and insights that I’d sheltered myself from. I didn’t know how to save the world or raise my voice above the cacophony of sounds radiating from the universities around the world, filled with people who all wanted to help and be heard and volunteer and give back.

I didn’t realize that the only thing I had to do was start by breaking the mold. Start by being honest with myself and then spreading that honesty like peanut butter. Letting that gooeyness stick into all the crevices.

You’d be amazed how people can relate to honesty.

There’s a world outside the box, outside the doors of the library, outside the entrance to the university. Education might start in a classroom but it ends in the streets where kids are playing and getting caught up in violence and parents are sitting them down at the kitchen table to impart life lessons. And those parents go to bed praying they’re doing something right.

The first thing they can do? Tell their kids to break the mold. To find balance between school and everything else. To give themselves a break.

If Jesus had a car thousands of years ago, you think he would’ve passed that up in favor of walking across the desert for 40 days?

My mom never told me not to talk to strangers on the Internet. If she had, my life would’ve turned out drastically different.

my own road trip through virginia

My dad wouldn’t have driven me—on his 40th birthday—to a golf course down the road from our house where I would, presumably, meet a boy I’d never met face-to-face. Running on pure faith that he wasn’t a child molester.
Well, maybe not that much faith. He turned out fine.

I don’t remember how it started six years ago. The beginning doesn’t matter.

What matters is that my parents have, for as long as I can remember, trusted me to befriend the right people. Whether they live 20 minutes or 20 hours away. Doesn’t much matter.

The fact is, I’ve met so many wonderful people through this crazy Internet thing. And a lot of them are doing absolutely awesome things with their lives.

But I have a little story about two of them for you—Lauren and Max—who know a bit more about blind faith than my 16-year-old self did, standing in a golf course parking lot on a hot August afternoon.

More than two months ago, Max decided to travel the country. Counting on the kindness of strangers to carry him from one end of America to the other. And about a month ago, he stopped in the middle of Ohio to pick up Lauren—a girl he fell in love with through the Internet—for the ride. The two of them are devout Christians with a love so intense it puts a lot of people to shame. A lot of people.

And as they drive through the country on a wild road trip that many openly disapprove of, I am giving them major credit. Because even though I have never met these two wonderful individuals, they taught me one of the most valuable lessons:

That Christianity does not demand perfection. That to sin is to be human.

I’ve lost my way, steering toward all the other directions in life that are screaming out with flashy lights and bright colors for me to come toward them. They’re more exciting, more real, more right-here-and-now-oh-yeah. I have trouble sitting still, reading a book that wasn’t published within the last ten or fifteen years, and going on blind faith that in order to be a good Christian, you don’t have to be perfect.

For some reason, it doesn’t matter that making mistakes is in our nature, or that I’ve heard people write that and tell me that hundreds of times. Even Miley Cyrus. Or should I say Hannah Montana?

For the girl who makes her share of mistakes on a daily basis – yes, daily – but has a boatload of trouble accepting herself for them, this is a big deal. World changing thinking. My shins will thank you for stopping me from kicking them (figuratively speaking, of course).

Nobody who wanders the world on the generosity of others has everything perfectly tied up. And neither does someone who jumps in the car to follow, ready and willing to leave her city behind. But that’s good. That’s what’s real.

They don’t devote every single moment of their lives to other people. They devote a lot, but not all of it. They’ve both stumbled through moments in their pasts and they’re both trying to figure out what they want in this world, but they know they’ve got God in the backseat, making sure everything is safe.

They have houses to crash at, friends to depend on, and love to hold onto and spread out. And you know what? If Jesus had a car thousands of years ago, you think he would’ve passed that up in favor of walking across the desert for 40 days? Yeah, didn’t think so.