The Color Purple

I was planning on posting the following on facebook, but then I realized I have a blog for these personal revelations, so here it is:

So, I see lots of people talking about their personal philosophies on Facebook, and I'm generally like psh, no one cares what I think about these things.  But I've realized I care about what my friends think about things enough to read longish posts, so either I'm pathetic, or someone might be slightly interested in reading something I might want to say in a longish way.  So Imma get on my soapbox here and write a little (lotta) bit about what I've learned (or am learning) this summer because what the heck right?

Sometimes, my life seems to have themes.  Like I'll learn the definition of a word, and all of a sudden it pops up in lots of conversations across different parts of my life (for example, the word "canonical").  At the moment, I feel like this quote from The Color Purple (which I've just finished and is beautifully amazing and Im cry) sums up the theme of my summer:

"I think us here to wonder, myself.  To wonder. To ast.  And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident.  But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with.  The more I wonder, he say, the more I love" (283).

I've thought about this while reading this book, which I feel I've barely scratched the surface of (and which I'll definitely have to come back to), but also during my summer job.  The students I work with are having a really hard time with some of the material they see in their lectures (I work at a math camp), and it seems really far out to them, like how is this math if we don't solve for x?  But I've been trying so hard to tell them to ask questions when they don't understand something, either to ask me, or (the real challenge) to ask the professor during class.

But after drilling this message into these kids, I've realized that it's actually such a good strategy for most things in life, whether its math, literature, or just personal philosophy, especially for a college student.  Someone posed the question today, "What gives people fulfillment?" (or something like that).  I think we get the most fulfillment when we ask big questions, even if we can't even begin to understand the answer yet.  Every time we ask, we learn something small, and once you ask enough times, those small things grow until all you want to do is ask big questions.  Which is why I want to come back to this book.  It didn't really give me many answers, it just got me wondering what it could all possibly mean, and I think if I read it enough over my life, some day I'll puzzle something out.

You know, it's kind of rare for a book to inspire me to write (sometimes these blog posts feel like a chore), but ever once in a while, one definitely does.