I Think Because I Thought

Today is the first Saturday of 2009 that I have not spent attending a wedding. And, while the ceremonies were beautiful, and I'm happy for my friends, it's a relief to be able to sit in a coffee shop this evening and NOT worry about being one of few single women at the reception. Instead, I'm sipping a mocha and preparing to crack open Descartes' Meditations.

It's funny, I encountered Descartes for the first time during my very first week of college. I had never read philosophy before, and I was thrown into the deep end right away, reading Descartes, Kant, and Hume in back-to-back weeks. I remember being confused and frustrated by the language and the abstractness of his discussions. I couldn't understand why it mattered how we know things, thinking it was just silly for anyone to sit around all day trying to doubt everything around them. In short, I hated philosophical inquiry.

Now, seven years later, I see things slightly differently. I'm still not a huge fan of reading philosophy, but now I can see the connections to psychology and theology. But I have a more patience for it now, and I find it much easier to read.

When I started undergrad, I was amazed by the amount of reading and writing I was expected to do. I remember complaining to my parents that all I was going to do for the next four years was read and then write about what I read. That was a shockingly correct prediction, though it ended up stretching to seven years thanks to my masters program. But as I return to a text I haven't looked at since my first semester of college, I'm amazed at how much I've changed. I so frequently take what I've learned for granted, since I use the writing and reading skills every day. But when I have such an obvious comparison, I can't help but be thankful for the skills I've acquired. Unfortunately, I think I've finally developed these skills just in time to be done with school for a while. *Sigh*