Falling with Style: How to handle finals and life

(originally a column in BYU-I's Scroll newspaper)

Pixar has given us some pretty memorable lines, including, “I can speak whale!” and “With this GPS we’ll never get lost!” But, the most memorable for me just might have to be Woody’s exasperated exclamation that Buzz Lightyear can’t really fly, he’s just, “falling with style.”

That phrase, and Buzz’s endorsement of it at the end of the movie, has made me think a lot about how much the idea of “falling with style” applies to real, everyday, non-animated, non fairy-tale life. 

All that goes up must come down. Except for those few satellites that get exiled into outer-space forever, gravity rules. Cars that are new today, will eventually be rust buckets, buildings crumble like sandcastles. 

This lack of perfection shows up in stuff before it’s even finished too. Any first semester engineering or chemistry student can tell you that you that all measurements made on anything (other than whole number counting) are, at best, guesses that are “close enough”.

Or, for the more artistic, the closer you get to a painting, the more you realize that even the Mona Lisa is just a bunch of swathed brush-strokes plastered onto a canvas that is slowly aging and degrading - think of the song, “dust in the wind.” 

Even biologically, our bodies are in a slow, losing battle against the entropy of disease, slight cellular mutations, oxidation and other “aging” effects. Added stress from things like finals week and breakups only intensifies these processes. So, if it’s all going down-hill from here, what are we supposed to do?

Fall with style my friends. Fall with style.

Take a break from concentrating so much on the next case-study and help your neighbor with the papers she dropped. Get up and go on a hike at 5:30 AM to see the sun rise over someplace you’ve never been. Learn how to cook something Italian or say, “I love you” in Italian, (both could come in handy). Go all out on your humanities presentation even though you had never even heard of a “harpsichord” before. See what it feels like to go an entire day without complaining about a single thing, just for fun. Bake a cake with some friends, knock on a random door, sing Happy Birthday, and walk away without offering an explanation to the recipients.  

Even though “Falling with style,” may just sound like a nice way to state the inevitable, I’ve come to believe what Buzz realized. Contrary to popular opinion, pessimism does not denote intelligence. Just because life isn’t a scripted fairy-tale, that’s no reason not to shoot for the stars. And who said that this life was everything anyways? “To infinity, and beyond!”