The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden is one of those children's classics that everyone has to read at least once in their life. The movie is great (at least the version I grew up with), but you still have to read the book. I started reading it for a paper that I was planning on writing on why children's authors choose to put so much social commentary in their literature (I definitely did not pick any of it up as a child), but the paper got narrowed down a lot so I didn't have time to finish it until just now.

When I started reading it, all I could think about was India and how this book talked about the social/political attitude towards colonialism. I read A Little Princess over the break and that book had a lot of the same commentary. Both books feature a little girl who is brought back to England from India because of war/death, and this little girl has to learn to adapt to English society.

As I continued to read this book, I started to pick up on the values it's teaching. 1) The importance of being outdoors and exercise. 2) The need for opposition in all things. 3) The power of our thoughts.

I think the one about the power of our thoughts struck me the most. There's a boy, Colin, who decides that he wants to learn to walk and be a normal boy (his whole life he's been told that he's a cripple and that he's going to be a hunchback or die at a young age), so every day he goes out into the secret garden with Mary and Dickon and he calls upon the Magic of the place to help him become well. Once he stops thinking of himself as a cripple and he starts to believe that he will be able to grow bigger and stronger, he does.

Mary is also influenced by this positive thinking. Once she decides that she wants to be agreeable, she starts to see the good in other people rather than looking for their bad qualities. She decides that she wants to be productive rather than just listlessly waiting for other people to entertain her. I think that's what I identified with the most.

I'm back to working full-time in this little office where nothing ever happens. I spend hours a day on Facebook or talking to friends on Google chat or playing Minesweeper. I get bored beyond belief; there are little projects that I could do around the office, but no one's going to notice if I do them or not, because they're just things to make my life easier. So I've decided that rather than spend hours doing nothing I'm going to try to focus at least an hour or two a day to these little projects, and I'm going to make my mind up to be productive.

I'm also going to try to focus on the good qualities of the boys I go out with. Ruth and Jordan can attest to the fact that lately my life has been a string of first dates that I'm not really interested in following up on. Maybe if I look for the good qualities in these boys and try to be interested in them it'll happen. That's not to say that I'm desperate to be in a relationship. I'm pretty happy with where my life is right now, but it couldn't hurt to show more interest in the boys I go out with.