When I met my husband Chris three years ago, he proposed, along with marriage, various philosophical ideas for my consideration, and it was a veritable struggle for me to understand what the hell he was talking about. I wanted to understand... I read and read and read and looked up words like "existentialism" in the dictionary and just found myself more confused all the time. I scribbled notes in my journal, wrote down titles of books to read, and sifted through countless webpages that seemed to speak in a language I could not understand. As time went by, I began to feel more and more confident and safe, more so than I had ever felt before, and countless realizations began to dawn on me. One of the most important of these was that I really don't have to try so hard. Sometimes the easiest way to understand something is to trust that you will. Suddenly, the texts I had tried so hard and failed to understand turned into plain and simple English. I realized that although many of my realizations seemed to occur to me "independently" of what I had read, thousands of people in history have realized the same things that I have, and have even said so. I have greatly enjoyed seeking these people out and sharing their thoughts on this site, along with my own. Susan Gwartney :  |