When Things Don't Make Sense

Growing up, I was completely obsessed with things making sense.
My dad used to get mad at me a lot because every time he asked me to do something I would ask him why.

A lot of people used to think that I was a rebellious youth, and I guess I was rebellious, but I didn't want to be, I WANTED to obey authority and make them happy, but I didn't know how to do that when they didn't make sense.

My mumma has always understood me better than anyone else in the world. Whenever she asked me to do anything, she would tell me why and that made obedience so much easier for me to do.

I've always been a question asker. When I graduated highschool one of my friends took a fith year and I remember him telling me that school was a lot quieter without me there asking a million questions.

Throughout my life, I have met a lot of people who find my questions to be frustrating. It is rare for me to feel like someone is actually LISTENING to my questions. Usually, I feel like people are just waiting for me to shut up so they can tell me that I am wrong and they are right, without ever actually explaining why.

The thing that few people seem to be able to understand is that I actually don't LIKE arguing with people. I WANT to agree, I just can't unless it makes sense.

In the past few years I have met more people who are willing to actually listen to my questions and use them to sharpen their answers into something that I can understand.

I have really appreciated this.

However, I am also starting to realise tha I am never going to understand everything, and it is the journey of constantly discovering new answers, and even new questions, which helps make life so exciting.

This is an embarassing story: for one reason or another I took a year off between highschool and university, this gave me a lot of time to think, so when I got to university I thought I was pretty secure in what I thought about things, but I was scared to talk to other people about these things. One day I finally had a really intense convorsation with a guy in one of my classes. Afterwards, I just had to sit and think for a bit. That convorsation raised so many questions when I had thought I had it all figured out. I remember calling my mom completely excited to tell her that there was still so much I didn't know.

My mum couldn't help but laugh: she is 32 years older than me and still has questions.

The point is, for me, having something to ponder makes life exciting.

I am also beginning to appreciate the beauty and importance of things that can't be understood.

I remember last Christmas me and my cousin were standing in our uncle's kitchen discussing Christianity. (Cause that's what I do at family reunions, hahaha, my family is special, many of us are very intelectual and enjoy discussions, it is fun.) I mentioned something about my frustration with things about God that don't make sense and he said that he wouldn't want to worship a God that made sense because then that God would be smaller than us. How can something smaller than my brain create the whole world? It's a pretty simple concept but I had never considered it before.

A slightly more disconcerting reason to just let things not make sense came to me from one of my professors today. She commented that perhaps our modern day need to analyze everthing is actually a form of arrogance. We must think we are pretty smart and important if we think we can figure out what everything means.

Another thing that has made me reconsider my love for things that make sense is the poetry class I've been taking this semester at school. I didn't know we were only going to be studying poetry or I wouldn't have taken it. This might strike some people as strange seeing as I love to read and write poetry and my favourite word is "poetic." However, for me, the beauty of poetry is that I can't understand it with my brain. It makes me feel something deep in my heart that I don't know how to express in words and, when we try to box it into something we can understand in class, I always feel like the poets would probably just roll their eyes if they could hear us.

As much as I love wresling with things until they make sense, and as nervouse as I am about things that confuse me, I have to admit that there is something beautiful about those things that you just can't comprehend.

ARagTagHooligan