If you’ve ever been out to the true Midwest, you’re familiar with the part of Ohio that becomes so eerily silent at night that when you sit outside you truly begin to wonder if life still exists. This past weekend, I visited that town on the shore of Lake Erie that I grew up with and came to accept with love as the place that people live their quiet lives and choose not to leave because it’s better that way. It’s a better alternative than moving to a big city rampant with chaos and people laden with stress. It’s no surprise that it’s the place my family and I ventured to when we wanted an escape from reality. And even today, I find myself yearning for that weekend break in Norwalk during the semester. Learning new things about yourself and life continues to be accomplished here.
We watched this documentary called I Am about a director who chose to give up the riches of his success and settle for a more quiet and connected state of being. Every word said in those two hours impacted me — though many of them I had heard and read previously and then pushed aside when I came to think that my own problems we re still significant and ever pervading. The truth is, though, that the only reason we have problems is because of miscommunication and turning the simplest of things into a game. As a collective species, we’ve ventured far off from where we need to be. Collectivism, sharing our resources and loving all friends, enemies and relatives is so vital and though we’ve realized this, practically none of us have actually felt it. If you look at animals or nature, you see that each piece of it takes only the exact amount of what it needs. A tiger kills when it’s hungry and kills no more. A tree takes as much water as its roots allow because his neighbor thrives on those same resources and if that tree decided to be greedy and take as much as it wanted it would leave the rest of the forest scarce of nutrients and at risk for survival, thus leading to its own demise. And this is exactly what the human race is currently undergoing. Fame, power, a hunt for all the resources we can attain, this is on our to-do list, this is why we come to college, this is why we have to spend the entire weekend in inebriation just so we can muster up the strength for the competition it takes to merely stay alive. And as a result, we leave half the world in despair, poverty, and isolation, and ignore them because we’re trapped in the thought that our issues are important.
I’ve been struggling with college so much because half of me is miserable, and in turn I do everything I can to escape it. Trying to fill myself with worldly pleasures, but this is equivalent to attempting to fill a void, a sort of black hole, that will never be satisfied and will keep growing until I accept that this void will not only never be closed, but will take me over until it wins. And this is exactly what cancer is: a virus in the body that takes more than it needs and multiplies until it takes you over completely.
We have constant hints towards a life on consciousness, and we either let them multiply or see them and brush it off like a tick. We have to grab them and let it manifest throughout us in order to hear what our body is trying to tell us. Until then, we will never figure out what it is we have to do that will contribute to the collective greater good. The human race has much to do if we’re to ever move past the point of trouble that all of us are turning our heads against. Surrendering to the uncertain and not making everything that happens into a larger problem, these are the lessons I learn in my time staying in the true Midwest.
Garrett Lemery is a freshman studying communications at Ohio University and a columnist for The Post. Email him at gl496111@ohiou.edu.
