Fast forward to high school. Where I commence to make some very poor choices, continue to endure education and also have a some education that alters the course of my learning and life.

High school. High school for me, was by and large, a small amount of fun, not very challenging, a few good teachers and one class that (not to oversell this, but really) literally alters my universe. In high school, I loved Drama, English, English Lit., Writing, Debate…can you see a pattern here? History, Social Studies, Science, Math…not so much.

History, really, should have fit in with the other artsy fartsy stuff that I liked, because it’s story. But the way history was taught was so unbelievably irrelevant that I couldn’t make sense of it or why it mattered. Then I took a course because it was supposed to be easy and I was just fleshing out my credits to graduate in the least painful way possible. This course was taken by mostly ne’er do wells to also flesh out their credits and I wasn’t one of them but I also was just trying to get through it. So I guess I kind of was one of them. Not my usual modus operandi.

The course was called Western Civilization and it was based on this video series called Civilization by Kenneth Clark. If you ever find yourself complete ignorant of where you came from and bored to tears about history and what it is…watch this. It’s old, like 1970 ish, it was even a little dated when I watched it in 1980. But it changed my life.

This series is a four part overview of Western Civilization that looks at the various aspects of history. A little description I pulled off amazon says:

Kenneth Clark's sweeping narrative looks at how Western Europe evolved in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, to produce the ideas, books, buildings, works of art and great individuals that make up our civilisation.

The author takes us from Iona in the ninth century to France in the twelfth, from Florence to Urbino, from Germany to Rome, England, Holland and America. Against these historical backgrounds he sketches an extraordinary cast of characters -- the men and women who gave new energy to civilisation and expanded our understanding of the world and of ourselves. He also highlights the works of genius they produced -- in architecture, sculpture and painting, in philosophy, poetry and music, and in science and engineering, from Raphael's School of Athens to the bridges of Brunel.

It is conceivable that it’s available online somewhere but I have not looked into this. At this point, I should describe the course a little. We watched the four part series, one each couple of weeks. Then the instructor, who clearly loved history, took us into a deep dive into the aspects of each video’s content. I was captivated. Safe to say, I may well have been the ONLY student in the class captivated. The jocks and the slackers dozed through many classes. I, on the other hand, was on fire, in spite of myself. Dr. Haynes, the teacher, was delighted. When I pulled a 100% mark on the final exam, he found me in the school hall to tell me and hugged me. Perhaps I was one of a very few students who ever appreciated his class.

Bonnie, seriously, changed your life? uh huh.

It was my first bumping up against the idea that I came from somewhere. Some place, some people. That I was a part of a long line of somethings and someones. I had a history. I had thought back as far as my parents, grandparents, even great grandparents. But that I was a part of a much larger story never occurred to me. Perhaps because I was raised without religion, I never pondered the fact that I belonged to something. To the big story of mankind. And that changed my life. It was the first time I stopped, at age seventeen, to realize that I matter. Not just to my parents or community but that I am a small human in a huge chain of events and people and places that are all connected.

My existence mattered. And at the moment, the WHY of my life began to develop.