Thursday, January 12, 2017

What I Did at School Today.


My Winter term started this week and so I am back in school after a month off. It has been hard to click back into gear. It would be an understatement to say that my time up here has been more difficult than I expected. It has been rough, guys. I’ve been very discouraged (and continue to be). Today though I was doing the reading for one of my classes and I came across a paragraph that reminded me why I value the time I get to spend here doing this work, and really why all this higher education thing is worth the pain, cost, and frustration it requires.

This is from an essay by Deborah Knight entitled, “Why We Enjoy Condemning Sentimentality: A Meta-Aesthetic Perspective”:

If we are to appreciate the natural environment aesthetically, (...) we must attend to it differently. Our normal way of attending is to treat nature as an unobtrusive background. It is there, but we overlook it, focusing instead on objects or occurrences within the overall environment that attract our attention. We begin to attend differently if we transform that unobtrusive background into an obtrusive foreground.

What she’s telling us - and what all this book learnin’ helps us do - is that finding solutions to a problem has a whole lot to do with how we look at the problem. Adjusting how we see does wonders for helping us to see better.

That is a helpful thing to know.

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The further I progress in my education and in my life as a thinking person, the more I end up making this note in the margins ...


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