Delightfully Enlightened

With my long-standing goal of majoring in secondary education, I've developed a strong obsession with TED Talks. Particularly TED talks that highlight education, success, and humanity. For those of you who don't know what they are, TED Talks are basically educational "talk" videos recorded from conferences held by the TED organization. In other words, they're a way to watch incredible speakers talk about their passions and discoveries from the comfort of your own home (or, if you're like me, your less-than-comfortable desk chair). In the spirit of the TED slogan, ideas worth spreading , I've decided to share one of my favorite talks with you for this week's post. Check it out (and feel free to explore all of the talks TED has to offer here )!

This past weekend, I attended a youth retreat and the speaker made a joke about how every girl has about seven "best friends". He then proceeded to say that this makes no sense because you can't have seven friends who are the best. This got me thinking: why do we call it a best friend? The term "best friend" could potentially create a lot of unnecessary competition. What do you do if one best friend get's jealous of another? Or wants to be the only one? Not that some girls don't do that anyways, but why encourage this competitiveness with such an exclusive term? Now don't get me wrong, I am 100% guilty of using the term "best friend". In fact, I probably overuse the term. However, I've never used it with the intention of placing one friend in rank over another. So here's my new dilemma: if I'm going to use a term so frequently, what do I mean by it? In other words, what is a "best friend"? Photo Credit: Bridget...

For my first blog post, I thought I'd explore what the title of my blog, delightfully enlightened, means. As you could probably guess, the delightful part comes with the connotation of, well, delight. My hope is that you'll find some form of delight in the words I write on this blog. That brings me to enlightenment. I don't mean the enlightenment era, although there are some pretty fantastic works to be read from that time. Locke was undoubtedly the real MVP of philosophy during that time. Anyways- what's enlightenment? In the context of this blog, enlightenment is very much what it sounds like: to shed light on something. My goal is to open your eyes to new topics and create an environment where you can explore the depths of your mind- if only for the few minutes it takes to read a blog post. That said, I'll leave you with a quote to ponder: "Enlightenment is when a wave realizes it is the ocean." Photo Credit: DebM WAVEART Thoughtfull...