Philosophy – Welcome

When I was a kid I remember watching a short Disney cartoon that made an indelible impression on me. It showed a bear named Humphrey, who desperately wanted some fish. He swiped at the lake over and over, and all that he ended up with was a tiny minnow. As he held it above the water, sad that it was so tiny, a bigger fish jumped up and swallowed it whole.

At that point he had an epiphany. He could hold the fish over the water and one by one collect the larger fish that jumped up to eat the minnow. Soon his arms were full of large fish. Just as he was about to go away with his dinner, a small fish jumped on the side. He dropped all of the other fish and pounced.

In another vignette, when his arms are full of fish, he sees a fish bigger than them all. He throws those to the side and pounces again.

In my first year of college, I pulled a lot of all-nighters—and not the wimpy ones where you go to sleep at 3 AM and then get a good 6 hours rack-time before going to class. No, I mean staying up until the sun rose and then going to class without having slept at all. I did this because as a Political Science major, I had a lot of reading to do. I have always been a good reader but a bit of a slow one, so that meant spending a lot of late hours reading and chewing ice to stay awake.

I remember one night I finished my homework around 4:30 AM. My morning class was at 9, and I knew that 3 ½ hours sleep would end up only being worse than if I hadn’t slept at all. The chances of oversleeping my alarm was also just too great. So, I made the decision to walk somewhere off campus and watch the sunrise. In my young man’s mind this was a good idea and I don’t know if I’d experienced a sunrise on my own before.

Category: Philosophy

Stealing the Sunrise