Social Experience

I got sick of making banal status updates on Facebook over the summer.

At the same time, I received a gift in the mail of the book "This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life." This is a transcript of the commencement speech given to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College by David Foster Wallace.

I thought it was entertaining, it made me laugh, and it was printed as single-page quotes.
I also like the message.
To sum it up... you have the control to chose how you think, and thereby react, to the situations of your life.

So I entered the speech on my status one day at a time.

I was surprised by who commented on the words, and what they said. I really enjoyed seeing those responses and engaging with people in a way that was more considerate than like, "LOL", and "cute dress".

A couple weeks ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about the experience, and she told me that she figured out that the words weren't mine, so looked up one phrase to find the author. She told me that he suffered his whole life from severe depression, and after weaning himself off of his medication, hit a low that led to him to commit suicide.

When I think about how thoughtful his words are in the book, and how focused they are on the individual taking charge of the thought process, I realize that only someone very concerned with the condition of allowing your "default" consciousness to control you would have composed a speech like that.

Anyway, this was an interesting exercise to use the Facebook forum in a different way, that paid off FOR ME!
and since its MY Facebook page, y'all gonna live in my world if you come over!
:-)