Thinking?

I've been known to think on the rare occasion. It's often closely related to fly fishing, which is pretty much one of my favorite things. I like to walk up rivers in my shorts and t-shirt and think about life and make analogies and metaphors and poems and songs. So here's my thoughts from our fly fishing trip on Friday.

Number one, sometimes things don't work out the way you think they will. In fact, I'd venture to say that most things don't turn out the way you'd initially imagined. I figured this out on my way down a cliff that I didn't think I'd have to climb down, but it ended up being the only way to get to the river...so down I went. It was an adventure. But in all seriousness, when you plan to walk down a path and end up having to scramble down a cliff, you think a little bit about how much life is like that. You may think you're headed for a wooded glen and find yourself on the edge of a gorge, and what do you do then? Freaking scramble down that gorge. But another thing--make sure you're not going it alone. Don't ask people that love you to stay away while you struggle; that's just selfish.

Next, education is dang exciting. Think about it--connecting things you learn from one place to things you're learning in another place, attaching your life experiences to the things you're talking about in Music Theory or Book of Mormon, and stuff like that? It's just so cool. The big idea I got from this discussion with Dad is that everything we learn contributes to our "worldview"--the lens through which we each individually see and interpret the things around us. My worldview isn't the same as Kat's, Kat's worldview isn't the same as her mom's, her mom's isn't the same as my mom's, my mom's isn't the same as my dad's, so on and so forth. We've all learned different things and thought about them differently, and that affects the way we see the world. I mean, if we were all standing around and Marcus Mumford walked past singing Lily's Eyes, we'd all have different reactions (like falling over in a dead faint, in my case). None of us would interpret it the same way, we'd all have different thoughts about it, and it would literally be a different experience for all of us. None of us would be exactly the same person we were before it happened. And here we could jump into Bakhtinian theory, but I'll save that for another day.

The point of that rant is that every person on the earth is irreplaceable. Literally irreplaceable. Nobody on this whole planet is the same as you, and that makes you incredibly precious. The way you think about life and the world and the things around you is absolutely unique to your mind. Isn't that fascinating? And doesn't it make you feel special? (It should, because you totally are.)

Gee whiz, that's pretty heavy and I did a terrible job of explaining it. But I hope you got a least a little bit of sense out of that mangled mash of thought-vomit. If you only remember one thing, remember that you are the only you on the earth. You've never been here before and you'll never be here again, and you are wonderful and unique and special, so you better share yourself with everyone around you. They deserve to know you.

Hmm. I'm not sure that's the post I originally meant to write, but there you have it. Happy Sunday!

Oh, and by the way? I love temple dedications.

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing - MoTab
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uslytyVrWFw

-Kate