Fiendin'

My little sister Denise is still in high school, and if you don’t know her, let me tell you that she is the most adorable little sister I could ever ask for. Anyway, she was asking me for help in her English homework. She needed help analyzing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18… “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”…

Well my mini-revelation is not in the sonnet at all, and not necessarily in the analysis, although that is where my revelation stems from. Basically, she asked me what a certain line meant. I don’t remember exactly which line, but it stumped me. I read the line almost 20 times, and it made absolutely no sense to me. Needless to say, I was irritated that I could not answer the question for a high school homework assignment. I know that summer has done a number on my brain for the past 3 months, but I’m not completely retarded.

So then it dawned on me…

I need to read and understand the entire sonnet if I want to understand that one line. I read the sonnet a few times, soaked it in, and suddenly that line made sense. I realized that a lot of times in life I get so caught up with the little details, and while these little details are all important and contribute to a higher meaning, I would be wasting my time on these details if I didn’t first look at the big picture.

So, there you have it. Don’t get tangled in the details of your life. It won’t make any sense. It will frustrate you. It will eat you alive. That’s what happens to me sometimes. I get so caught up in what I wear, who I hang out with, what I’m going to do in a few hours… while I do so much, I still felt this intense emptiness. Like, I wasn’t accomplishing anything and life was no longer making sense. Now, I know. I need to re-evaluate the big picture. What do I ultimately want to accomplish? What do I want in life and what do I have to do to get there? While I haven’t figured it out  yet, the details of my life are starting to make sense, and now I can weed through which details I’ll keep and which ones I’ll cut.