Packing our Proverbial Suitcase
The end, or is it. When we pack our suitcases, it may be because one leg of our journey has come to a close, but with one chapter closing, we turn to the next. I’ll miss sitting in a classroom twice a week for an hour and a half just discussing our world views, our experiences, how we are different and how we are the same. Out of all the classes I’ve taken over my academic career, this one holds the position of being the most unique, and in some ways influential.
Perhaps the biggest thing I learned is that I don’t (didn’t) talk enough. Not to say I’ve experienced a lot in my life to this point, but what I have experienced I have always internalized. In class, sitting in that circle, listening to my peers share facts about their life that I know were hard for them to divulge (I will not, for the privacy of those student, disclose who or what these facts were.) really forced me to think about some of the experiences I have had in my own life. Plato’s Symposium discusses different world views on love, and inspired some of what I wrote a month ago in A Focus on Love. My experiences in this realm have helped to shape me and how I live my life. I live life more day to day than in a prescribed pattern as a result of these experiences. I’m, at the end of the day, happy. I got to be kid again, at the age of 16, and it was wonderful. Never loose your inner kid.
In our exploration of the scientific way of knowing, we looked at just how unique the human brain, and the experiences it makes possible, are. We explored Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight, in which she discusses the blending of her perception of self and perception of her world as she experiences a stroke. The images she invoked made sense. As her left brain checked out, right brain said, “Party Time!,” and tossed her into sensory overload. Her experiences are not unlike my dreams, where my left brain seems to go to sleep, allowing my right brain to conjure up images that would not be physically possible otherwise, yet these images invoke vidid real life, causing me to wonder what was dream and what was real life, often double checking key facts such as due dates, project specs, or the date upon waking up, just to root myself back in reality. A strange thing indeed.
So, you ask the question. How did I become the person I think I am today. Good question, I answer. I believe I am a product of everywhere I grew up. Not just the house, as I show in my shrine project on display in UNCSA Workplace West III, but the people I met there. Everyone from Columbus, IN that I call home, everyone from Exeter, NH where I spend a year in the middle of my life. I wish that the lecture audio from our introduction to the shrine project was available, but alas, it’s not. That lecture, looking back on it, really encompassed what the class was about. Finding that thing, that moment, that person, that memory that has shaped everything we think about the world.
So that’s the end. If you stumble across this blog, one in a vast universe of other voices on this modern world of the internet, this is it. This is the end of this blog, until something else comes to mind. Until the next chapter, I’m outta’ here.
-Pangle