“life got in the way”

When I was writing my final self-evaluation for this class, I was trying to write what I thought about my attention to blog posts. After writing about how my quality of work has changed and grown since the beginning of the semester for a sentence or two, I then went on to talk about my pacing and said, “I tried stay on top of my blog posts at the beginning of the semester, but life got in the way,” and for some reason this really stuck out to me after I wrote it down. I feel like this phrase “life got in the way” is a perfect way to describe the concept and courses that we discuss in this class and the way that this class functioned in a whole.

We see this idea of life getting in the way in all of the books that we have read in class because I truly do feel that humans are not bad people; they are just driven by life’s forces. Whether it be the governments laws and rules at that time, the push to win or succeed, the forces of survival, we all move, learn, and grow due to these outside forces. Life getting in the way seems to be the way that we grow as a society and the way that we grow as individuals. We can see this in all of our characters throughout our course. Whether it be Alice having to leave her community because she was raped and got pregnant or Mark Spitz killing the skels because there was a plague. No, I don’t really think that Alice wanted to defy her governments regulations and get pregnant and I don’t believe that Mark Spitz wanted to be a sweeper and kill for a living; but life got in the way for them. They both had a plan of how they thought their life was going to go and then something big happened and they had to adjust and keep on moving. They had to do what they needed to do in order to survive.

We also see this idea of life getting in the way of our class as a whole and the way that our class had operated. Take for instance the way that we held onto medical voluntourism. No, I don’t really think it was Professor McCoy’s intention to get so hung up on this topic, but we got interested and life got in the way, so she ran with it and invited speakers. When we spoke to them they were able to explain the SUNY Geneseo side of it and explains that you can’t expect to change a whole society but like I said before life gets in the way. They explained that long term change cannot happen just because a group of wannabe doctors come in for a couple of weeks because they will leave and the natives will have to get back to the way it was before because life gets in the way for them as well. Even the people who do want to go on these mission trips and help out to boost their resume, they do so because life gets in the way and they think that they need that extra push to get them into college or graduate school. I doubt that they really want to go into an environment where they are not yet qualified for, but they did so because of life’s forces. 

I think that this idea really helps to shape a conclusion about what this class is all about. Sure it is able race and medicine like the course title says, but the class is so much more about just the books we read. Life getting in the way explains the reason why we always sit in the same seat in our circle. It explains how we came up with the final course statement that we did. There is one way that you expect your life to go but then life gets in the way and changes it all. I can’t for certain say that is changed for the good but change is inevitable because “life gets in the way” whether you want it to or not.

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