contemplation

Thank you, Jane Lee for that post. haha I love my major. I really do. I love literature, the things it tells you, the way you can use language and rhetoric to tell your own story.

When a good writer writes, he or she writes with conviction. They write, accounting for every word, every sentence, every punctuation mark. They mean something with their language.

What do you mean with your language? How are you expressing yourself? If you listened to yourself, would you get from it what you hope your listeners will get from you?

I think we spend most of our lives avoiding listening to ourselves. We act without contemplating why we act. We speak without being able to account for why we are speaking. More than half my daily conversations are with people just trying to fill up the silence, myself included. We narrate what's happening, what has happened. We remind each other of the past and contemplate the future without ever stopping to think about why these things matter.

I think this is what I love most about my major. When English majors read, it's not about what the character did, how the writer expressed it, the progression of the plot. It's all about why.

How much of your life can you account for?
HOW MUCH OF YOUR LIFE CAN YOU ACCOUNT for?

My answer is... I don't know. Ask me ten years from now and I hope I'll be able to respond with "ALL OF IT!"

Before you move on with your day, ask yourself this question:
1) Why am I at this particular place in my life?
And I'm talking about all of it.
I'm talking about your job/student status. Why are you studying this over that? Why are you going to school at all? Why are you on this particular career path? Why are you working at all?
And don't give yourself some bullshit response like "because I have to, because I need the money. because it's the only way to survive in this world" because that doesn't reach the core of it. Why is money important to you at all? What's your goals, what are you trying to get out of life? What do you value most?
And I'm talking about your relationships. Your friends, your family, your significant, or not so significant other. Why are you with the people that you are with? Why are you with the person you're with? Again, saying you're obligated to them, or attached to them, or love them, isn't good enough. Don't congratualate yourself if you come up with some cliche response like "I'm not complete without him, I can't live without her." It's not enough.

I'm not going to test you on this. You'd only be cheating yourself. Realizing why you are where you are, or rather, realizing that you can't figure out why you are where you are, may make you finally understand where and who you want to be and make the appropriate adjustments.

We are so grateful to have been born in this world human, to be able to think profoundly, contemplate things outside of our experience, figure out motives, deny our animal instincts. It's too much of a gift to waste it floating through. Life is beautiful. it's malleable, it's dynamic. your decisions matter. Please, make them count.