Can someone drop some happiness into my philosophy book??

I officially attended my first week of classes to begin working toward my PhD in nursing.  The anticipation of moving and starting a new journey was thrilling and exciting until I sat down to begin studying my most dreaded topic: philosophy.

I read one page and immediately began drifting into dream land…I kept trying to focus my mind: 

“Kelley, think..this is important”

 My mind replies: “Kelley, this is not important- in fact, this is the least important information you ever encountered…I swear these guys were on drugs when they wrote this stuff, Kelley. Just put the book down and go do something fun.”

My mind and I argued for several hours; I believe that our argument turned vicious after we tried to study together more than 9 hours yesterday.  Finally, I conceded to my mind: 

“Wow mind, you are right.  Either this makes absolutely NO sense, or I am just DUMB!!”

When you sit down and feel like you wasted an entire day reading a Dictionary written in Chinese (and you speak English) you kinda get depressed- I’m not going to lie here.  So to try to pull me from the depression, I had to pull some interesting, applicable, laughable, spiritual, and sensible quotations from my philosophy book.

Interesting: “Philosophy” literally means ‘love of wisdom’” (what happens if you don’t understand it? Are you incapable of wisdom??? I need to know STAT!

Spiritual: “We observe a world of many things over which we require a sense of its unity into one world.”

Spiritual:  “We observe a world containing a plurality of objects; behind this there must be something that binds this diversity into one permanent unified cosmos.  Without such a “something,” we lack an overall and ultimate explanation for the world.”

Laughable:  “Sun on moist things, whereby fish developed, and within fish adult humans were originally formed who appeared when the fish form was shed.”  Yep- you got it- we are created from fish skin!

Sensible: “Everything is a process; there is no beginning, only becoming.”

Applicable: “What seems good, from a certain point of view, is good, and we cannot say objectively that one view is more legitimate than another.” Finally, we can outlaw arguing…we are ALL right!

After hundreds of pages of: X denotes X if X 1 is abc and abc isn’t a form if X 2 is def….I can comfortably pull five quotes…yep….five! Should I laugh or should I cry?? I am trying to keep things "optimistic,” I will stick with laughing.  Wait! I don’t think optimistic situations involve lying…so I change my mind- my primary choice is crying!

Shand, J. (2002). Philosophy and Philosophers: An introduction to Western Philosophy.  Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.  ISBN 0.77735-2445-0