Thursday, March 13, 2008

learning. knowing. learning that which we always already know...

amazingly after finishing off a 25 page paper which I struggled over I find nothing more soothing than getting back at the old blog. I guess its like drinking off a hangover in a way (though I have never understood how this works), to get over the pain of all that writing I need some writing to cure the pain...anyway next up a little Plato.

In my paper about the construction of memory and how we remember or what we even call remembering I came upon an interesting idea by Plato. Let me distill. I bet you already know it, even if you think you don't. Let me explain. Plato asserted that nothing new was ever learned during life. Humans for him were born knowing everything of significance. This original knowledge is lost over time and events though so that when we think we are "learning" we are actually recalling some original truth which we had forgot without forgetting. A little out there maybe but I think Plato might be on to something, he was a pretty smart guy after all...

This idea is optimistic which might be why I like it so much. The truth is there. We know it. It exists inside of us but we need to simply "learn" it anew. What this means is that remembering is in a sense returning to our original "all knowing" self. Our capacity for knowledge is already there, we just need to pull back the curtain of life a bit to find out what we have forgot. Sometimes we get so caught up in every day, in feeling like we need to learn it all. What we need maybe is to stop and listen, learning in this sense may not be of the reading the books sort but more of a stopping to listen to the void sort. If deep within us lies the knowledge we seek rather than looking externally maybe we should also leave some time to turn inward. Savor those moments of silence. Take the time to listen to the knowledge within you that think you do not possess. Maybe this is what instinct is. Or following your gut. Or following your heart. Either way you cut it I like the idea that I once had the answers but I need to simply just recall what I already knew. This is all experience is then. Slowly through the gradual wearing of time we begin to see, begin to realize and begin to feel like we actually do know something. I don't know how much sense that makes, but the pain of writing has left and the joy of sleeping has quickly descended upon me. Back with more philosophical ramblings from after a brief snowboard trip to Whistler BC where I will hopefully recover some of that ease on the snowboard that i once knew but feel I have forgotten. thanks to Plato though I now know, its there, always has been. just need to peel back a few layers of experience and let it emerge. hopefully ill be thinking my next thoughts deep in the middle of a big powder turn or maybe i wont be thinking at all. ill just be living. yeah living the moment that sounds pretty good right now!

Friday, March 07, 2008

a favorite story of mine

I can't claim credit for this story but I think it is amazing....

THE MAN FROM BOGOTA
A Short story by Amy Hempel

The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge - though not, she threatens, for long.I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.I tell the woman about a man in Bogota. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not like a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.When the ransom was paid and the man was released his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then - that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota .
He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.

Thursday, March 06, 2008

What we need

Interesting piece I found online....


Absolute control

Each person knows how best to be at peace with life; some need at least some degree of security, others launch themselves fearlessly into danger. There are no formulae for living out one’s dream: each of us, by listening to our own heart, will know how best to act.


The American writer Sherwood Anderson was always extremely undisciplined and only managed to write when fuelled by his own rebelliousness. His first publishers, concerned about the abject poverty in which Anderson lived, decided to send him a weekly cheque as an advance on his next novel.


After a month, they received a visit from the writer, who returned all the cheques.‘I haven’t been able to write a line in weeks,’ said Anderson. ‘I just can’t write with financial security staring at me across the desk.’

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Traces of life

“What we see resonates in the memory of what we have seen; new experience always percolates through the old, leaving a hint of its flavor as it passes. We live, in this sense, in a remembered present” –Adam Zeman

Do you ever have those moments where you are not quite sure where you are? Not literally where you are physically, but where you are in time? Have you ever had those times where time seemed to fold on to itself and you were in the same place but everything was different, as if the life you had been accustomed to just changed with out you knowing? The other day I had one of those moments........



After seeing I missed a call from my mom's old cell phone number, which my little brother uses to call me occasionally I called it back. As I was standing there on the beach, I did not give much thought to how many times the phone had rung, I was on the phone but in that waiting phase where your mind wanders as you wait for an answer. Then all of the sudden the phone went to voice mail...."Hello, you've reached Barbara...." For a brief second I wondered if I had just awoke from really long dream. There on the other end of the phone was my mom's cheery voice mail, the one that always made me laugh because it is so her. By that I mean you can tell she set up her voicemail while doing 10 million other things (as she usually did) and you can sense the happy franticness in her voice. She ends the voice mail with "have a good day, night, ahh whatever time it is" and laughs.



This voicemail made me think of the traces we all leave on life. Here it is nearly 2 and a half years later and my mom's voice is still there. For a few brief seconds I was flooded with tons of happy memories of my mom. Her franticness. Her gentleness. Her cheer. Her overflowing exuberance for life. Just from a simple voicemail. For a few brief seconds there I was standing on the beach wondering if I had imagined it all. We leave traces. We leave moments. It was not just the trace of her on the voicemail that startled me, but the traces of her I see all over the place. Moments that take me back in time. Just prior to that phone call I had been out in the water surfing. As I paddled around in the gorgeous pacific ocean, I thought how did I get here? Not literally here but in this present moment.

For me that present moment was distinctly tied to my mom. As I sat in the crisp pacific water waiting for the next wave I was flooded with memory of my trip to the surf shop way back at the young age of 15 where my mom purchased me my first ever surf board. I remember my mom carrying it out of the shop for me and squeezing it into her car. I remember the first time we took a trip to the ocean with the new board and how excited she was that I was going to surf. I remember those humid new york summers and my mom shuttling me back and forth to K road in the Hamptons just so I would have a chance to surf. All of these memories emerged from seemingly nowhere as 12 years later I sat in the pacific waiting for yet another wave. This this is the thing about time and memory that amazes me so much. We often think of time as a linear progression, and that we possess our memories. But maybe memories possess us, they come back to remind us and re-create bits and pieces of our life that we conceive as "past". In that moment my mom was alive in a different sense. Her giving nature, her sense of adventure and sacrifice, all of those are what led me to be paddling out into the pacific this weekend. Small actions, actions she probably thought nothing of but live on for time immortal. Time in this sense lives on. It is not a simple linear flow from one moment to the next. Our memories can re connect us with past moments, illuminating in a sense how we arrived in the present moment. The present moment then is inextricably tied to the past. Those seemingly minuscule moments, the hour or so that my mom and I bought that surf board 12 years ago, weave themselves into the everyday fabric of our lives. For now and forever whenever I paddle down the face of a wave, as the cold pacific water catches my board and it picks up speed, as I quickly hop to my feet I will feel my mom gliding along with me. Call it heaven, call it after life, call it memory, call it what you will but somehow I know in those moments though she is gone in the physical sense she is very much there.

Quote of the day

"We go out into the world in search of our dreams and ideals.Often we store away in some inaccessible place what is already there within reach of our hands."
(Maktub)

I don't think I can hope to add much to this. I saw this quote and it felt like someone kicked me in the stomach it rang so true. How often do we search for that which we already have? Why is the distant so more appealing than the close? Why does everything have to be a process of discovering rather than simply realizing we have it here, right now? What do we give up in search of our dreams? Who do these dreams belong to anyway? I also dont know who I would be without these dreams. The search consumes me and if I woke up one morning content I would feel empty. Is that insane? I think it is possible to be happy without being content, or maybe again I am struggling with content versus complacent, I can't distingush the two and perhaps therein lies the problem.

Monday, March 03, 2008

blogging for your health

this just in...blogging is not only good for you, its good for you

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/03/03/blogging-social-health.html

does blogging about blogging count as a blog post?