A friend of mine lent me this book entitled Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson. It sounded like it was about a subject that was right up my alley, that is to say, it is broadly about Epistemology, Philosophy. At least, at one time I was really into Philosophy. Well I started reading it, and I just couldn’t, really. It was just like it was when I went back to community college 5 years into my mid 20s and being excited about the different courses that I could take now that I was in a Big City school. I would be able to zoom in on something for which I held an affinity, that was not available in the Interior. I took Philosophy, as I thought that the feedback that I was getting from a narrow variety of friends and acquaintances was telling me I was a “deep-thinker” and this could be my thing, my calling. I could be a teacher, an academic maybe. It was not my thing in fact, and I often would read my textbooks and assigned readings for periods of time only to realize that I was not absorbing much at all. I would come-to momentarily and look back at numerous paragraphs and began to understand that I could both have a voice in my head that was reading the print copy on a page yet be tangentially day-dreaming at (almost) the same time. This caused me great consternation, and I felt quite angry at myself, demoralized at the time it was taking, and ashamed no less.

Well this happens to me all the time, I know now, and it always has. I am not quite so hard on myself as I was, and it alleviates the problem somewhat, not to be. The associated, cascading anxiety merely inhibited my reading comprehension. Something that is important to take from this shortcoming of mine and the accompanying self-flagellation is that I have a need, perhaps more than a lot of people, to engage myself with reading material or any activity that resonates, seems valuable, or feels interesting.

When I reflect, I recall that the “he’s a daydreamer” comment was made on my primary school report cards more than once. I think it was a nice way of saying that I regularly did not pay attention in class, and that I could be caught off-guard by targeted questions from the teacher. This is rather a punitive and questionably affective means of correcting a student, I must assert. I sense that it still occurs and I ultimately see it as an attempt to humiliate and coerce a learner into compliance, with fear.

But I digress, and that’s just about all I can flush out on those subjects for now.