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!” 

BYU-Idaho's Big Problem

BYU-I’s Big Problem

Brett Stone Looking for Trouble

BYU-Idaho has a big problem. It’s not the dozens of professors who have quietly given up higher paying, higher prestige positions to teach here. It’s not the plethora of new state of the art buildings and facilities constructed in less than a decade. It’s not even steeply discounted tuition. 

Our big problem is that we don’t have a big problem. Although we might not like to admit it, we humans crave opposition. We need it. How else can you explain passionate rivalry sports games, mountain climbing, putting a man on the moon, or even (gasp) complaining about things that, when we honestly stop to think about them, really don’t matter much?

So it is with BYU-I. In all reality, we’ve got it about as good as it gets. Yet that is precisely the challenge we face. A common opponent or problem unites people, minimizes differences, and helps people stretch personally and collectively to achieve extremely difficult objectives. 

BYU-I students face almost none of that. This isn’t to say there’s no room to improve or that we shouldn’t honestly identify and strive to overcome more routine problems. But any honest assessment would show our problems are, if not very small, at least very different. There’s no rivalry with the University of Utah, no Communist Russia to beat to the moon, no frozen wilderness to cross in hand-carts. In response, we often complain about things that, relative to our situation, are as big as we can inflate them to be. 

How can you overcome a problem that doesn’t seem to exist, you might ask? Looking outside ourselves is a good place to start. Once we realize how many real challenges other groups and individuals face, it becomes easier to see how small our own problems really are. 

“Losing” ourselves, individually and collectively in serving others and helping them overcome their difficulties is one sure way to win the fight against inflated problems. Whether it’s teaching English in Peru, donating blood, or just offering to help a roommate or spouse with their homework, the challenges we need, and the solutions, are all around us. 

Besides feeling “warm-fuzzies”, recognizing this big problem and learning how to fight the good fight now builds us in another important way. The world as a whole is experiencing truly “big” problems. Once we graduate, those problems will be ours by inheritance and it will be our task to face and help solve them. 

Some may question the ability or destiny of “simple” BYU-I grads to help change the world. But, to paraphrase a very wise man, “The work of the world is not done by geniuses...”

We have a God-given responsibility and opportunity to help develop solutions to the world’s biggest problems. BYU-I’s big problem is also its most amazing opportunity and is anything but non-existent. We’ve just got to see it for what it really is and then go to work.