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In life, most attempt to agglomerate information and organize it into some form of cognitive schema.  There’s simply no way you can walk through life by selectively intaking what you desire to learn.  It’s thrown at you in waves and humans do their best to collect, organize, and use this information to their advantage in some way.  However, there can and do exist times when the influx of data can exceed your capacity for sorting; when logic departs and most of us are left with feelings.  These irrepressible feelings manifest themselves in unique ways within each human: some cry, some get angry, some shut data out, and a select few buckle down and hunger for more.  Despite exceeding their sieving abilities, they try.  It is in this gray area - unbalanced, unpracticed, and uncertain in your footing, that life tries you.  These trials and tribulations yield a level of discomfort that allows us to grow as people.

I belong to that crowd of knowledge-thirsty sub-thirty youth.  Curiously, the other night out of boredom I visited AskMen.com and was pulled towards an article: Top 10 Ways to Become a More Interesting Man.  Intrigued, I clicked the link and was greeted by a story which could only be intended for an audience of children.  The website required me to click through a series of photographs pertaining to some monolocution that was succeeded by a 1-2 sentence explanation on how “convincing her it will be fun” or “leaving her wanting more” would make me a more interesting man.

Not buying it.

The next day I made my commute up to Irvine and met my friends at a coffee shop in the pretentious city of Irvine.  What I was greeted with was an interaction that would likely change my life, if I allowed it to - ironically manifested in the least pretentious and most unassuming human that I have yet to meet: Avi Cohen.  Similarly to myself, Avi listens and observes and learns about people before strategically forming some type of bond between himself and another.  On this day, he took up the task of analyzing and aiding my two best friends, Chelsea and Mishana.  It quickly became apparent to me that they were missing his subtle intentions: in search of looking for life’s answers, they barraged him questions which he was not amenable to answering.  Instead he focused on providing us with the tools for growing ourselves (later in conversation when I prompted him for the altruistic benefit he gained from helping us, he likened it to growing a plant - but this is a fallacious analogy as we must do the growing ourselves).  

Avi speaks about “feeding” the three principle areas of a human - mind, body, and soul.  To become a completely rounded, well-balanced human, he informed us, you must feed each of the three in equal parts.  If you feed your body three times a day with food, your soul and mind should be nourished in an equitable manner.  I believe we share the opinion that there are very few of us that achieve that - but the result of doing so would result in someone quite like himself (my words, not his).  I guess you could call him a Renaissance Man - an intersection of all knowledge used to cultivate a progressive human being.  Upon identifying our weaknesses, he gave us some recommended reading (and all three of us love books).  For starters, he recommended the infamous Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s renowed10 Stupid Things Men/Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives.  We each have or are in the process of purchasing copies to pour over, discern, annotate, and grow from.  The list of reading materials, activities, and advice didn’t end there.  

We didn’t dissect myself very much, but one reverberating moment I must share.  He asked us to identify our pre-pubescent ambition.  Mishana wanted to be an astronomer, and I wanted to be a writer.  Upon learning my current life’s trajectory, he asked what about the doctoral path had intrigued me, to which I responded: the intersection of altruism and technology.  As a career, he then recommended something to the effect of being a medical-tech journalist and introduced me to Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink.  The epiphany floored me and my jaw lingered agape as a career that would likely be the perfect fit for me had never even crossed my mind.  We talked about having the courage to do the things that you want to do instead of relying on the security of a comfort blanket that a cubicle and 9-5 job offers.  Myself included, few leap to take the chance to really explore their passion and go throughout their lives seeking, threading, developing this blanket that really does no use for the progression of…anyone.  How did this person that I had known for merely an hour just scrutinize me so successfully?  And what more knowledge and growth do I have to gain from him?  

At some point I’m going to have to grow up.  Face the hard facts about who I want to be and become and decide where I want to go.  He gave some genius advice about finding a compatible spouse, and reaffirmed why I have ALWAYS valued love over anything else.  “Picking a spouse will probably be the most influential decision you make on your life.”  And he’s right.  About everything.  Every point of contention I had with some logical argument he presented dissipated with further explanation of the cold hard facts of empiricism.  Many of the things he divulged to the girls are processes I was already metamorphosing from boy to man.  But the most resonant fact he left with me is that it’s time to start working on the most difficult part (for me) of myself - my soul.  There’s going to be much more reading and working and curation of knowledge and whatnot, likely interspersed with meetings and guidance from this oddly-timed key-holder.

But watch out for me when I’m done.  Already he’s managed to do what literally induced mini panic attacks weeks prior - quell my fears about aging.