Segue-Proceed to what follows without pause.
Nancy Sommers mentions this word in her article "I Stand Here Writing". At the end of her article she writes "Having the courage to live with uncertainty, ambiguity, even doubt, we can walk into all of those fields..." Her quote there and the definition of segue remind me of taking life as it comes, not proceeding with caution and basically, whatever shit happens, it happens...oops. I have to say that I agree with that. Growing up being told to "proceed with caution, be careful, and think before you act" really isn't how I perceive life to be taken. I know that it can be a bit discombobulating, but that's just how I am.
I think that Sommers really hits it on the nose when she mentions that at the very end. Of course she uses it in the idea of writing, but it fits into a greater scale for life. Why? We only have 0ne life, unless of we believe in incarnation.....then we have more than one life. But shouldn't we live life to its fullest? Shouldn't we embrace every moment, even if that moment doesn't turn out so good? When you're lying on your death bed, wouldn't you rather want to be able to say "yea, I had fun, made some mistakes, but I don't regret it, I got to experience just about everything I wanted too." instead of "yea, i regret never going on a cruise or telling my sister how I really felt. If I could go back, I'd make those changes."
Those are facts of lives. Sommers says that we can't change them and we should just embrace them. They make up our dictionary or encyclopedia or movie! Whatever you want to call it, the facts of our lives, (sounds like a tv show) make us who we are. All of the bad things we did, our wrong choices, all of our good choices even, they are something greater and we can feed off of those.
All of our experiences in life, our facts, we can use those to write. Whether we are writing fiction or non-fiction, we can feed off of our history and get all of our ideas from there.
"despite the accumulation of grim.....my mother is an optimistic person." I'll admit, my mother isn't very optimistic, but she tries. I know I've made mistakes, but I'm optimistic about my future. Sommers is trying to teach her daughters that there is more out there and that they can be optimistic, even with all the shit that is out there, that they can use it to better themselves and learn from it all. Why shouldn't we all be like?
I think that there is only one person who can truly say to where we can understand. She's an extremely famous young women who can relate to Sommers grandparents. Her name is Anne Frank. I believe that it was her last journal entry where she said it, but I may be wrong; it's what I'm leaving you with. The truth, the facts, and how we question our authority, even though we just accept it...If Anne could be optimistic in life, why can't we be optimistic in everything about ours?
Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."--Anne Frank
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I read, then I re-read, then I re-re-read and I honestly cannot grasp the concept of this story. This is what I think the story means, and it’s not going to take me two to three pages to write it. I have gone on the internet and read countless essay responses and not heard the point I’m about to make but here we go.
There is a defined difference between learning and memorizing. And I think that Sommers makes the point with talking about David from her class, that you can write and comprehend what your writing or you can just write with no purpose, just write like you’ve been taught your whole life. And I think that this point can bring us full circle back to our first essay when we talked about the difference between knowledge and memory. I think that for someone to write, they must understand and have a full knowledge of what they are writing to get their point across. In the same way a person must have full knowledge of a subject to have “wisdom.”
These two essays are much similar. The only difference is that this one was a lot easier to read. There may be one other thing that I might be able to take out of the reading.
Even when I person is getting older and is still considered thirty- something, they still haven’t fully matured in life, they still don’t have a full comprehension of the world around them yet. I think this story mentions that when Sommers refers to her mom talking to her about luck and how Sommers compares her thoughts to standing in a field of a million four leaf clovers waiting for something to happen. This, I think has a little bit to do with the first point, means that when getting older, you start to make connections that you never made before and this will give a person knowledge. I hope I kind of made my point somewhat clear. I’m not as good at writing as I am talking in person.
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