Week 3: Me In My Natural Habitat

This Is Me In My Natural Habitat!

This week we have been learning How to Read a Book. I know that seems simple but it is not.

There is always a better way to do things, that you think you have mastered.

Just in case you were wondering yes, that is a stack of 20 dictionaries. At my feet. The oxford English to be exact. Or the “OED” as we call it.

I had the great opportunity to count all the books in our school. There were roughly 1,700+. Then I helped Mr. Hurtado organize them all. I asked him rhetorically “Has Dr. brooks read all of these?” His reply was this quote.

"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing more than thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?' and the others—a very small minority—who get the point that a personal private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary" (Umberto Eco).

That makes me feel better about not having read all the books in my parents Library or even my own now.

I got to drive the 1970’s truck! Guess what we named it? Truck yep classic. We also learned that “Truck” also means to barter or exchange of commerce. Neat! right? Yes, it is snowing still. We wake up and it feels like Christmas for about an hour then it is gone by afternoon. So at some point we will be climbing this mountain. I am excited for that. We have started running/walking a 1 ½ miles 5 days a week.

As we were heading up to run. Dr. Brooks never misses a teaching moment and talked to us about how it is easy to live without integrity.

But that if we learn how to live with it, in the little things like staying on the path then we will never have to worry about our lies and keeping or stories straight. That in the end it really is easier to just live with integrity. Building trust in ourselves and with others is the one of the most important things we can do.  

The first day our path was not marked out very well. (Mind you this is really cross country like: potholes, cacti, trees, rocks you name it we got it.) So it was hard to find out path. Dr.Brooks would yell back to me that I was going the wrong way. It felt like a simulation in following the spirit.