Well, I have about 95 pages left of This I Believe, and it's taken me a lot longer to read the book than I would have expected. Nonetheless, I'm still looking forward to finishing it before I return to school, so here goes.
(Allison, Jay, and Dan Gediman. This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women. New York: This I Believe, 2006. Print.)
- "When I write a poem, I process experience. I take what's inside me - the raw, chaotic material of feeling or memory - and translate it into words and then shape those words into the rhythmical language we call a poem. This process brings me a kind of wild joy. Before, I was powerless and passive in the face of my confusion, but now I am active: the powerful shaper of my experience. I am transforming it into a lucid meaning."
Well, I think I found my favorite essay. I write the occasional poem, and it usually comes out of spontaneity. And it's the same process as described above - I take some raw emotion or feeling and do my best to describe it using words as my craft. The first sentence of the essay reads "I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive." I absolutely love that idea that poems are a means of survival. That way, the thoughts and feelings and emotions are no longer inside of you, but down on paper. You put a lucid meaning to your thoughts and emotions and can carry that with you through your travels, keeping it in your pocket for when you need it the most. You can read this essay here, as well as browse around the rest of the website to discover whatever you come across.
- "I soon understood that all succeeding good things merely offset the bad. Worse than normal wouldn't last long. I am owed and savor the halcyon times. They reinvigorate me for the next nasty surprise and offer assurance that I can thrive."
This essay talks about the 50-percent theory, which states that half of the things in life will be better than normal, and half of them will be worse. Of course, it takes some time to figure out exactly what "normal" is, but everything will balance itself out in the end. It's a sort of karma that I also believe in, where if something's troubling you at the moment, time will take care of it eventually and work it out so that it returns to equilibrium.
This sitting of reading the book has probably been the best one so far - a lot of the essays were thought-provoking and made me think about my own life and the connection I share with some of these poems. Hopefully the end of the book is just as promising and interesting to me.
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