Back to Uni

I'll be the first to admit that heading back to school after a good long four months of steering clear from it had my stomach in knots. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the idea of learning new things and expanding my mental capacity. However, I have two thumbs down and a bitter taste in my mouth regarding what comes hand in hand with when classes are in session; namely, the omnipresent stress, the constant lack of sleep, and the ubiquitous urgency of meeting deadlines after deadlines.  

Now, I could go on and on whinging and whining about all the issues I have with university, but that would only add fuel to the fire. Rather, I decided to do something that would force me to have a more positive, la vie en rose outlook on my current situation. Instead of sulking about the struggles of going to school, I encouraged myself to find things that would make each challenge a little less unpleasant to overcome.

There are two things that I did in the first few weeks of classes in order to gain a more positive outlook:

TASK #1

I took pictures of the campuses as a means of forcing myself to shake off the habit of melodramatically seeing them as soul-sucking prisons (though ironically there is a rampant myth among the students that the architect who designed the school also designed prisons). Albeit popular opinion that people need to experience life at face-value rather than through a screen, I have found that I have benefited from being someone who constantly takes pictures because doing so compels me to find the beauty in the seemingly mundane. 

TASK #2

I also challenged myself to find quotes in my copious, never-ending piles of readings that resonated with me and my life at present.

I'm sharing below some of the consequent results of what I set out to accomplish. 

 "The mind has an excursive power to wander about the world" — David E. Leary (1992)"Not only was he inclined toward art, he said 'but life could be embittered if I were kept from it'" — David E. Leary quoting William James (1992)

"...bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue" — Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)
"forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness" — Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)

"The art of human understanding -- the art of grasping similarities among phenomena and thus forging perceptual patterns and conceptual categories out of the flux or chaos of experience" — David. E. Leary (1992) "The city is dying at its heart" — Clifford Shaw & Henry McKay

Stay Gold,

Kimberly