self discovery

It is super late so I will try to limit my long winded-ness and make this short. Today was quite an adventure. I tend to be going and going all the time, staying super busy (hence my super late night). But a really good friend of mine keeps checking up on me and making sure that I take time to myself to do something that I love. She loves to ask and make sure I'm taking my "me-time". There really is great wisdom in that. Even doing things you love with other people just can't quite compare to the amount of unwinding that happens by yourself, sometimes in a secret place, when you get the chance. For me I like to go into a room by myself and play the piano, or go down by the river (where the poem's pictures are from) and play my guitar or just think. But those are just the things I do. There are innumerable others to choose from, each individual to each and every person.



And like I promised, I started carrying my camera around with me today (though I've decided I really need to find a better way to carry it around). At one point today, I was just taking pictures, and playing with the settings a little bit. I discovered something that I have always sort of known, but never really noticed or thought about before. You know that I absolutely love learning. I talk about it in pretty much every post. And going to school and learning is such an awesome experience (as in awe expiring like being in the presence of a super powerful being {or someone you greatly admire} that you can just feel, as opposed to 'cool') and I don't want to discount it, even remotely! But discovering new knowledge, for yourself, is so much more satisfying. For the sake of learning all there is to learn in the time that we have to learn it, school is extremely efficient and very very valuable. But take the chance sometimes to discover something for yourself. You'll likely remember it far better too. And it doesn't have to be something extreme or different. It can just be as simple as learning some of the material for a class, but going on an adventure of discovery to find it and really understand it, supplementing the textbook information with confirming research that really delves you deep within the subject matter, rather than just taking your teacher at their word and copying their lame notes.

Here's a quick story about me that kind of demonstrates the potential for doing this. As a kid, whenever I would have a fact based question, my parents would go tell me to look it up. I think they were quoting some movie or something, but they stuck by it. Well I would go to our great (and now old) enc-yclopedia set and look up whatever it was. If there was something within that article that caught my eye or that I wondered what was, I would go look that up too, to better understand what I was reading (which I was obviously interested in since I asked about it to begin with). One thing always led to another, and sometimes I couldn't even remember what I had started with, because I had spent so much time following such a long chain of queries and articles. But it wasn't ever boring like doing research for a poster in elementary school was. It was some of the most exciting reading I ever did as a child!