i used to think i was open minded because i was "educated." my education somehow made me open minded by default. yet when people spoke of creationism or republican politicians or people who chose not to go to college, i just shook my head, not being able to understand how wrong people could be and how right they thought they were.
i just don't understand how i never really understood before. how could i just eat up everything people said to me without pausing to even think to question it? or look at it from a different angle?
it almost makes me sick to my stomach. just sick. sick to know i know nothing. i can't understand how i looked down on people who chose not to go to college, looked down on myself for only wanting to get my bachelor's degree, feeling like i would somehow be a failure or insignificant if i just became a mother and didn't do anything positive. these thoughts weren't born solely of my own accord, they had some help getting there.
why does our culture put such importance on "education" rather than on experience? experience is as hands-on as education can get, in my opinion. but maybe that's just the way i best learn things.
everything thus far in my life has been to prepare me for something else, so i don't end up a failure.
what measures success?
can i be a failure if i'm happy?
why must we "set our sights high" and "reach for the stars" and "strive for success"? what's so wrong with just being. just living. just loving.
i refuse to let my profession define me. why should i let it define others?
how can one class uproot everything i thought i knew? maybe it wasn't rooted very strongly. or maybe it's taught by a very very strong wind.
Honestly I believe that because every single person alive wants happiness, they do what they can to achieve it. Unfortunately, thanks to the media happiness can only be bought at a walmart or the local mall. Whoever has the most is the happiest. Yet if one were to apply that to other cultures, then EVERY third-world country must be drowning in sorrow. They have little to nothing, but they still seem to getting along alright, at least from what i can tell on TV. To some people all you need is a warm place to sleep and food in your stomach, and you've got the world. But for others, money is the only solution, and the only way the legally get money is through a job. So you choose a profession that seems like something you would like to do for the next 40 years, because if you leave too soon, you don't have money, and without money there is no happiness. But in order to get that job, you first need to get an "education" and go to school. So I suppose you looked down on the "uneducated" because they didn't know as much as you, didn't know what it took to be happy. But really all an education according to the government is, is what they think you should know to succeed. Yet in the end what you learned in school was just to prepare you for your life, the rest comes from experience. I hope that's what you were looking for, otherwise disregard this post.
ReplyDeleteIt can be quite disconcerting when you're first staring all your assumptions you've been going on in the face and realize you don't really know why you believe them, that you were swallowing the medicine being given you without questioning, assuming it was good and right. Remember, I was very liberal in college, too. But when I met Chester, and he questioned me on WHY I believed all the ideology I spouted off, I had to really look at it and it was very uncomfortable to realize that I didn't really know why. Or worse, that I really did believe otherwise, but that it had been put upon me by liberal educators that this is the way I SHOULD see things if I am EDUCATED. By the time I was 28, and after several years of soul-searching and reading varying points of view and truly being open-minded in my pursuit of what I believed for the first time in my adult life, I was angry, too, at the audacity of such bias presented as TRUTH in our education systems. The important thing is that you are welcoming the experience, no matter how uncomfortable. Let yourself go for the ride and see where it takes you.
ReplyDeleteWow... if you're happy, that's pretty much the definition of success, in my book anyway.
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