What is The Big Idea

Hi! I’m Hayden, and this is my blog. If you’re reading this first post, I imagine I did not need to tell you that. You are probably not an internet voyager. You’re probably a friend who has a vested interest in me. Thanks! If you’re one of those, there’s a very small chance you are an internet voyager. The Venn diagram between my friends and people who spend a great amount of time on the internet is fairly small. Hi Laura Beth.

So what is this for? Primarily, I want to keep learning. When, in English, we talk about a lack of growth, we use words like stagnant, static, and still. Watery words. When water is stagnant, static, or still, it is no longer good for drinking. It does not sustain life the way it once did. Movement keeps the water pure. My prayer is that, through writing my thoughts, I may become more pure. I desire to be good for life, like running water. Let me be clear, I do not think this blog is my way of making the world a better place. I am convinced that only actions can make the world better. Nevertheless, I am an extreme external processor, and I need externalized language to iron out my thoughts. The aim is that those thoughts, once known, will help me decide how to do good things. In a real way, the audience of this blog is myself so that I may reflect and grow. Perhaps you will read it, too. I suppose you are. I hope my attempts to make sense of the world around me will be a worthwhile read for you.

I am convinced one of the best ways to begin making sense of things in my young life is to read. I’m a recent graduate of Berry College (c/o 2025), and, in the past four years, I’ve gathered a strange love for the academic process of taking in new information through text and synthesizing my thoughts on what I’ve read in my own writing. Anyways, many people have lived a lot more life than I have, and I’d be foolish not to try and learn from them. My intent is for this to be a place for me to process and, in some way, dialogue with great writers. For any of my dear professors who have read my papers and may read this, beware. Here, I will have even less formality and an even more conversational tone than in my supposed academic writing! I write now as one with no academic pretense, motivated only by great curiosity and zeal for learning. I swear I’ll still revise and edit these posts, though. I do want to make some sense. 

The name of this blog is The Big Idea because that is what I care about. I love engaging with big ideas, and I want to make a lifetime habit of doing so. Here, I will respond to ideas I care about. Many of those ideas will stem from explicitly Christian writings, as they hold central priority in my life. Others will be compelling fictional stories. Perhaps I will post some thoughts on musical pieces. Maybe write some poetry. If I’m feeling wild, I may even write about some truly cutting-edge basketball schemes. I don’t entirely know what I’m getting myself into. If nothing else, I’ll have a solid collection of thoughts from my idealistic twenty-something self. That I can guarantee. After all, the reason I finally started writing this was because I was grabbed by a lyric from Oh Jeremiah’s “Joymonger (Reprise)”: “Joy can come from nothing, after all.” So I will write this blog as a young person full of joy and a desire to dig into this life. I may not make sense of much of it, but life’s too important not to try.

Looking forward, I have some poem ideas that I’ve been compelled to write as well as having just finished Esau McCauley’s Reading While Black and Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, so I have some big ideas looking to be ironed out soon 🙂