Hello Dreamers! How are your summers going? Mines been fun, but involving a TON of late nights. In fact, Tuesday night was a very late night. It was my "24 hour staying awake" day, which is a thing I try and do every summer. Does it throw off my sleeping schedule? Sure. Do the other residents of my household disapprove of it? Oh yeah. Is there no rationalization for it? Nope.
Am I still going to do it next year? Definitely. For one thing, it's a tradition, and one that I enjoy. It's kinda like the start of my summer, once I stay up to see the dawn of the new day. Until that point, summer is just kinda this thing that I'm muddling through... And that is no way to treat a summer! Well, the summer before the summer of Hell.
What's the Summer of Hell, you ask? Excellent question.
as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
-Coleman Barks
Am I still going to do it next year? Definitely. For one thing, it's a tradition, and one that I enjoy. It's kinda like the start of my summer, once I stay up to see the dawn of the new day. Until that point, summer is just kinda this thing that I'm muddling through... And that is no way to treat a summer! Well, the summer before the summer of Hell.
What's the Summer of Hell, you ask? Excellent question.
The Summers of Hell
There are two distinct Summers of Hell (that I am aware of), and they both occur after schooling. The first is after your senior year of high school, when your whole world is about to change, but is still situation normal. Your high school friends are still there, and your group is still hanging out, but you're all aware that this entire existence is just about to disappear, and high school innocence will soon be replaced with college responsibility. After that summer, the next time you'll be able to see all of your friends again will at the earliest be Thanksgiving, maybe Winter Break or Spring Break, but if you have anyone who will be going to school far away, then you'll most likely have to wait until the next Summer Break to see them. And both of you will have changed in that time period. You'll have made new friends, new jokes, faced new struggles and hardships, and all of these without your old high school buds. Makes you wish that high school was longer than four years, doesn't it.
The second Summer of Hell that I can talk about (because it is the only other one that I'm aware of) is the summer after you graduate from college. Imagine how terrible that would be, leaving college. Leaving high school must be terrible, but at least you're going to another school. Once you leave college, you're out in the real world. Sure you can go to grad school, get a masters, but how are you going to pay for that? Or your food? And you'll have to be paying your own taxes. The job market becomes incredibly important to you. And all of these worries are running through your mind all throughout this summer, in a very compressed fashion, since you spent the past school year studying and trying to graduate in 4 years. Now, if you didn't go to college, and you're already working, you get to wonder about your life when all your high school friends leave college and go off to live their lives, and you're left with a considerably smaller friend pool.
It's a pretty sucky topic, but it's not gonna be fun.
Two Kinds of Intelligence
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
-Coleman Barks
"We are all imperfect. We cannot expect a perfect government." -William Howard Taft
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