A new semester has begun, sooner than I thought it would and undeniably here. I have readings to do, notes to study and a syllabus to consult. But after the first class last evening, I also have new thoughts to think, which is why I’ve gone back to school in the first place.

So far, the professor seems to be asking the big questions. One idea that stuck with me from last night’s lecture is learning about what some call the Axial Age, a period of incredible intellectual growth and curiosity that lasted from the 8th to the 3rd centuries BCE. As the professor said, “People kind of woke up and started questioning and looking for answers about almost everything in a very rational way.”

It was a parallel awakening of consciousness across civilizations that’s hard to explain, and it resulted in the development of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, and Taoism, among other religions and philosophies.

The Axial Age gave us the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, and the prophets Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah. It was a paradigm-shifting age. No one one is exactly sure why it happened, but we live in its amazing wake.

(“A Reading from Homer” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1885, courtesy Wikipedia.)