Looking For Alaska

If you haven’t read The Celestine Prophecy, it talks about “coincidences and fate,”  much of what I read last night/this morning (a different book than C.P. – I read that a few years back) falls into my day and the strangeness of my day.  A personal family tragedy occurred which paralleled the reading of today’s book, Looking for Alaska by John Green.  While the subject matter disturbs me, I will not go into detail over the net about the personal issues for the sake of privacy and my inability to have a conversation 1-1 with anyone reading this blog post, I felt the need to share how “fate,” “connections,” and my belief in a higher being was reinforced by the way today went. (Read more behind the jump)

The story was about a young boy, Myles, who ventures to boarding school.  As a newbie junior in high school he is hazed and is introduced to people who help him see a more clear meaning of life.  Myles falls in love with a dynamic young woman who has a “turning point moment in her life” when her mother goes into a seizure eight years prior and is incapable of action.  Her mother dies as Alaska (the name she was allowed to choose at age 8) fails to act.  This theme reoccurs when Alaska, drunk, drives off in a car, and is killed when she runs into a jack knifed tractor trailer at 3am in the morning.  Was it suicide?  Was it an accident?  The friends who are left behind are asked to live with this question and how does one “escape the labyrinth?”  If Alaska’s death was suicide, how do those left behind manage to make sense and understand the meaning of the act?  Everything turns in that direction and I am left with why?  Life is not easy for sure and as described in the book through the story of the religion class (taught by an ancient scholar and seemingly on his last breath of life) offers these questions. Why and how does one answer life’s unanswerable questions through the lens of faith traditions?  The questions are worth exploring – sometimes when you least expect it…..  Personally my faith seemed to strengthen  itself today even under the most pressing of unimaginable questions. 

Green’s poignant writing and style is powerful.  The invincible fall, a lesson every young adult, adult, and even maturing senior citizen should reflect upon.  Myles states, "You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present,” but is this our fate?    He also starts his journey away from home calling it: I go to seek the Great Perhaps...  aren’t all journeys tailored to follow that phrase, taken from French artist Francois Rabelais. 

As my day concludes, I re-read another quote from the book which focuses on our responsibility for things that happen (good and bad)…Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. ... We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. I will never truly understand the taking of one’s life but having experienced this tragedy more than I would ever thought I would, my heart goes out to those left behind.  May those left behind find the support and knowledge that they (like Myles and his friends) were not to blame.  The book is a tough read.  Sometimes tough reads make us better as people.