A quarter of life

It's kind of funny how you can know something and then you can get something. You can know that 2 x 3 = 6, and you can get that 2 x 3 is two added to itself three times, and that is six. You can know something for a long time, and then you wake up one day and you get it.

People often say they have this kind of experience with testimony. You can think you know something about a principle of the Gospel, and then something might happen that makes you really get it. The phrase from the song on the seminary soundtrack -- "I learned with my heart / what I knew in my mind " sums it up well. Interesting that there are these two separate parts of our understanding, and it's hard for one side to convince the other without some kind of catalyst getting involved.

Yesterday I turned 25. I'm still young, for sure, but I had a get it experience nonetheless. Many people say they finally feel "grown up" when they turn 25. I'd have to say I agree somewhat, but the experience was bigger than that for me. For some reason I finally realized that I am actually going to grow up. While my brain could have told you better, my heart (for lack of something better to call it) was living in a delusion of eternal youth. I woke up yesterday morning and got it, that I am mortal.

Mortal people, I've discovered, have slightly different priorities than immortal ones. When time is recognized as a finite resource, one starts to wonder if he is making the best use of it. This is why, I believe, old people think time travels faster. They're running out of it. I remember that 5 years ago yesterday, I was in Barra da Lagoa, Florianopolis, Brazil holding the "Concurso da melhor torta (best pie contest)", a activation/fellowshipping activity. I got sang to and we all ate an unhealthy amount of various types of pie. I can't believe it was 5 years ago.

I can figure that I've probably used up about a quarter of my mortal life. What am I going to do with that time? Can I use it better than I've used the last 25 years? Fortunately, I get to skip the long stretches of diapers, incommunicatability, and public school now. I'm starting to become one of those people who is afraid of time just slipping through my fingers, like sand slips through that tiny hole in an hour-glass.

Here's the other part of realizing your life won't last forever: it comes with a realization that you're going to die. I've always known that I was going to die, it's a natural thing to do, and even for people with larger perspectives on existence that aren't limited to mortality accept the fact that death is part of the Plan, whatever plan it is they put their faith in. Now, however, I really get that I'm going to die.

That's ok, though, because I know that dying is not the end of things, right? But even if I know it, I really only half know it. That's a problem. Now that I get the fact that I'm going to die someday, it's really important now to get the principle that I'm not going to cease existence when my heart stops beating.

Is there something that you only halfway know? Is there some part of your testimony that hasn't been really examined because you haven't had a reason to really get the principle behind it? How do you make that happen? How do you learn with your heart what your mind already knows?

Heres one thing I think I got yesterday. There's a reason behind mortality. I imagine that when we're born, we're handed a saw, a hammer, and a bucket of nails and set in a forest. We are to use our saw, hammer and nails to build a building. Every day we are to make this building taller. On day one, we look around, and we see the trees around us, and that's all. "Neat!" we think, "trees to make a tower out of!" and we go after them with our saw, and once we have some lumber we start to build our building. Every day, as the building gets taller, our perspective changes a bit. After a while, the tower gets taller than the trees, and we can see beyond them. We might see mountains, lakes, streams, other towers, and as the tower grows we'll see more and more of the world. All of the sudden for me, life became a matter of perspective, and every day I get older, that perspective changes, and things that weren't as important become more so as other things seem less important than before.

There is something to be learned by living, knowing that you are going to die. Mortality challenges our hearts to internalize what we are taught about eternity. Now that I realize that I'm mortal, I'm going to try to see every day as valuable because not only am I going to run out of days at some point, but because every day offers a new perspective on the world, an opportunity to not just know something, but to really get it. I'm headed to the temple this afternoon as Joseph's fiance goes for the first time, and I'll be interested to take my new perspective on mortality with me. Hopefully it's a step, maybe a catalyst in bringing a testimony of immortality in to my heart, where it really needs to be.