Philosophical Journey: The Introduction

Philosophy was a subject that used to be so alien to me. I never understood its purpose and objectives. I used to think that it's another academic hurdle that I need to overcome since unfortunately, my school was one of the few, if not the only university in the country, that made the subject compulsory. Whenever I entered Ms. Jacinto's class, I had this feeling of isolation from everything else as if I'm encased inside a shell. It felt like the lessons are disagreeing with me and that my brain is refusing to process the lectures. I felt no progress and spent most of the class time staring blankly into space since I could not keep up with the pace. I kept trying my best to review the lessons on my own but to no avail. Everything seemed absolute gibberish.

Every session, I kept wondering if there was something wrong with me. I just found it so difficult to understand why those philosophers could not construct formal paragraphs and sentences to express what they want to say. Why do they invent their own words and add "ness" to those nouns and adjectives? Why do they keep on asking questions and leaving them unanswered? What made things worse was the feeling that I'm alone in this struggle. The rest of my peers seemed to have no trouble absorbing the lectures. I still remember my classmates who kept looking down at their notebooks and writing feverishly as if they are taking down every single word the teacher was saying. Nobody had any questions and if they did, it would be so advanced and insightful that I could not grasp it.

I hated philosophy at that time. Like all of my other minor subjects, I never saw its importance in my life after graduation. I really felt that this subject was going to be my downfall. Philosophy felt like a ticking time bomb since the semester was half way done and I still could not understand anything. Fortunately, Ms. Jacinto was lenient enough with my performance and my grades. I can say that I was just really lucky for surpassing that ordeal but it will take two whole semesters before I really learned to appreciate the discipline.