In his lecture “Drops Like Stars,” Rob Bell discusses the role suffering plays in our lives. He contends that suffering forces us to rise above the mundane and truly experience what life is. Most of us prefer not to take too many risks because failure is a rather unpleasant feeling.
We are constantly trained to eliminate mistakes from our work and our lives. Mistakes mean that we must face consequences: lower grades, fewer friends, less freedom. However, quality and consequences are not mutually exclusive concepts. In fact, they are both products of striving in life.
That is what so many people my age do not realize. We live our lives in bubbles where we are protected from the truest forms of life, trapped in a haze of social media and academia.
We do not experience life; we tweet about it. We do not create change; we read about it. We do not solve a problem; we rant about it.
Life does not happen in a bubble. It is complex and messy and rewarding and terrifying, but it is ours. We have a choice about what we will do with it. We can either engage in it or opt out.
If you are doing poorly in classes, will you wait for the professor to do a better job, or will you work harder? If you see litter somewhere on campus, will you leave it or pick it up?
Theodore Roosevelt once said, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly … and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”
The problems we as a generation will face cannot be solved with a social media post. We cannot help things get better by criticizing those that make the decisions or by never trying anything new.
Only when we are willing to suffer and be vulnerable, when we are open to being wrong or having our minds changed, can we make progress. Part of being human means we must open up our intellectual inheritance and examine it. We have to decide what is right and involve ourselves in the process of change.
Rob Bell and Theodore Roosevelt are all saying the same thing: You have to live a brave, engaged life. Life does not happen in the wings; it happens on the stage. There are many roles to play, but you must choose one.
Criticizing is easy, but understanding others is hard. Standing on the sidelines involves no risk and has no reward, so play the game. Step into the area and dare greatly, and never be afraid to fail.
Ethan Davis is a junior philosophy and English double major from Laurel.
