I took a rhetoric class last semester, and when I chose it, I did it just because it fits on my schedule, I never really thought more of it, didn't try to investigate what it was about or how good the professor was. In all honesty, I was going through the list of classes that fitted on the requirement I needed and was a time I wanted. I didn't put that much thought into it.
During the first week of class, I thought my professor was sort of weird, you could see how passionate he really was about the topic, and how qualified he was.
At first, I didn't pay too much attention to it, I knew how rhetoric works, how it was going to question how we are persuaded, how the world unconsciously makes us do things without thinking or question it. This was all things I thought of before but I had never really acknowledged them, like why did I wake up this morning and picked out the outfit I was wearing. All these rhetorical questions that we all know are out there but have no real answer to them.
One day I went to my professor's office hours, I was talking to him about an assignment, and he asked me, "why is this so important to you?". I looked at him and I really couldn't come up with a single answer that made sense and answer that would actually answer his question. So instead, I said nothing, I just didn't know what to say. After a small pause, he said, "exactly, that's the beauty of it", there is no real explanation for anything we do in the world, the choices we make, the things we believe in, they are all a part of the universe we cannot explain.
After I left his office, I was just plain confused. You could say I went to a place in my life where I just wasn't sure what I was doing, all these philosophical, unanswered questions were going through my head and I just wasn't sure what I was doing, what I really wanted to do. I went straight home and just lay in bed, thinking, but not really, nothing substantial or worth remembering.
The only thing I really know is that after that class, and my talk with him, everything changed, I didn't see the same things anymore, it was like the whole world change, and my life did as well.
