Lighting a fire

"Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire." ~W.B. Yeats

Once upon a time, I dreamed of being a chemist, just like my dad.  I wanted to go into his profession and make him proud, continue his work, I suppose.  I was young and full of ideals, not to mention I hadn't started high school yet.  Thirteen was an amorphous age for me, in which I didn't yet know what I was good at, what I loved, and what I wanted to do.

It wasn't until I took high school chemistry my sophomore year that I realized I couldn't stand--or understand--chemistry.  Math and science were still interesting, but I hungered for something more beautiful, more natural to the fairy-struck, ever-pondering patterns of my soul.  I'm the type who, left alone without a God or a purpose in life, would while the years away sleeping in faerie rings and existing more fully in another world than this one.  I'm not naturally content with my everyday existence.

Finding beauty in school has been difficult, to put it in the kindest of terms.  Sometime between eighth and tenth grade, my zeal for learning began to waver and gutter, and the intensity of my inherent longing for something otherwordly grew continuously stronger.  In the words of W.B. Yeats, "education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire."  My world, the tasks, the classes, the homework--it had all transmuted into a slow, reluctant dripping into a tired old bucket.  

Little snippets of inspiration and intrigue served to root my feet, however tenuously, in the grass and the meadows of this world, but I had no spark, no fire.

Enter Honors Program, University of Tulsa.  Reading Homer's The Iliad the summer before college began was an endless white hallway, lined with hundreds of closed doors.  Tedium doesn't begin to describe the feeling of utter sensory repression I experienced.

Whoever thought I'd end up rereading and studying that very same book for fun?  I wanted to dance with the wind, sleep in the curve of the moon, laugh with the voices of bygone legends.  But the moment Professor Howland sat down and began to speak, I was hooked, firmly grasped and drawn by what was an examination of that which I most avoided--reality.  I never thought philosophy was “my thing,” but here I am, declaring every day that it’s my favorite class.

The Iliad is behind us, and we've moved through Aeschylus' The Persians and into Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.  I wouldn't say it's the Greeks so much as the depth of discussion and conversation that I love in this class.  There's something about meeting with twenty peers and a very awesome professor to consider literature written by men who haven't walked this earth in centuries that makes real life interesting. 

The fire for learning that I lost when I was fifteen is back, full force, burning in my veins and driving my mind with inspiration.  I guess education still holds passion for me, hiding dormant all the while in a quaint, gorgeous world known as “humanities.”

It must be love…