Matchingsocks’s Weblog

(This post was written in Uganda. This girl is backdating it.)

It’s the quintessential philosophical question: a train is barreling down the track towards a split path, on one track lies your mother, tied to the track unable to free herself, on the other track are five children, also tied to the track, unable to free themselves. You are the train station-master and you decide which way the train finally barrels down. You cannot stop the train in time, neither do you have time to free anyone, and you must make a decision: what do you choose to do?

Mr. Toesocks and this girl spent a long time discussing their lives, the choices they made in their lives and the consequences it bears. He says, we need to do the right thing, which is different from doing what we want, or what we need. Either choice you make as a train master is right- albeit for different reasons, but they’d both be valid. He gives the example of the Palestinians and the Israelis fighting over the Gaza strip, both have equally valid- and therefore right- arguments, and they are, unfortunately, mutually exclusive. Life’s funny that way.

Life is all or nothing for Mr. Toesocks. He tells the tale of this girl he is madly in love with- a girl, mind you, that he knows takes him for granted and is not a good person. But, he’s still madly in love with her in a way only someone who has been madly in love with someone else before would know. And he tells this girl that he’d give it all up- everything that he has, the recycling plant, his PhD plans, his everything, in a heartbeat if she’d have him. Life’s too short, he repeats, to not live life with everything you’ve got. Love’s funny that way.

So, this girl pushed a little more and asked if he’d give up his life’s vision for this said, same girl, even if he’d know that she’d up and leave him in two weeks. And he said yes, though he’d concede that he’d have to think very hard about it. This girl called him a romantic, he said, it was about impacting- or the chance to impact- one life so powerfully that would drive him. That while sometimes all you have is your life’s work, at others, it’s the life that you led that truly mattered.

It was an illuminating conversation to say the least. It made this girl truly think about grad school and all that she felt about it. Mr. Toesocks called it life’s social obligation. That if her two years at grad school could potentially save even one extra life, she was obliged to do it. It was her social duty to leave the world in as good a shape as she knew how from whence she got it. And she should not only go, but go to the best possible place she could get into in spite of money- meaning pay her way though if she had to. She asked him where and with the most flippant yet straight face, he said: Harvard. He mounted the most convincing argument this girl has heard yet (complete with nested loops, suggestions, NLP-ness) and, much to Smartest Friend’s rolling of eyes, she’s promised to take a serious look at Harvard if they do accept her.

Life, he looks straight at this girl and says with an intensity that has to come from a person’s soul, needs a seriousness of purpose which we ought to be singularly focused on and pursue with all the tenacity that we can muster. To go head to head with the best of them, believing full well that even if we won’t make it, we’d go down fighting to the death. Because, he echoes time and time again, life’s too short to not live in an all or nothing manner.

Wow.