I like to tell myself it was at the end of 1999 that I made the first New Years resolution I would ever keep. It may have been a bit before that, but it sounds good. The resolution itself was pretty simple, but the reasons behind it were a bit deeper.
On this solstice I am again reminded of my childhood fascination with the stars, the orbits, and just the way the universe works. The way the planet is tilted from it's orbital plane as it revolves causing the rotation around the sun through the year to change the length of the day we experience, the angle and intensity of the sunlight falling upon us, combining to give us seasons.
When I was in grade school, I had a real problem with homework - I just didn't see the benefit or purpose to doing work on material I already understood. As you can imagine, this wasn't really a supported viewpoint by the teachers who were busy assigning me said homework. Mostly this went on with a few notes home to my parents, and some slipping grades (though the test grades which measured my understanding of the material never suffered). There was one teacher however, who in addition to the above, assigned me in class writing assignments - repetitive sentence writing.
Words are symbols of meaning, they represent ideas and concepts outside of the mark on the page or the screen or the sound in our ears. However, this representation is not nearly a static thing, for language evolves. The meaning of a word is colored by culture, history, by our own personal experiences and insights. Often times words, especially in the English language, end up with many accepted meanings, and each of us may default to a different one, which can certainly cause confusion.
I don't remember when I first heard this saying, but I do know that it wasn't really that long ago when I was able to actually really hear it, and to grok the meaning and reasoning contained within this small collection of words.
So often in life I have been frozen into inaction because I wasn't ready to tackle something. I didn't know enough about the subject, I didn't have the right space to do it the way I thought..........