week#14

TO LIVE IS TO KNOW?

I think of this in many ways. I learn things by experience. Hands on. You can tell me how to transplant a sappling, but until I do it on my own and feel its roots, feel the soil, understand the sunshines effect, etc, I really don't know. Some people can grasp things without having to do it with their hands and sometimes I can almost..... but when I get it in my hands, is when I say I know it.

But to ask is to live to know? There are so many directions of that. As I live I know. But as I know more, the only thing I really know is that I know so little. Many people think that since they have lived it, they know, but in truth they may only know for themselves. We are so complex. And maybe they don't really know. Perhaps I know how to transplant a baby tree, but I have really only done that in michigan and california, so do I know how to transplant trees in africa?

I think to live is to be open to understanding. To at least know that there is no one way. But if we don't at least try one way we are so much further from knowing anything in the first place. I guess I know that I can't really stand people that think they know everything.

MEMORY AND MAGIC

A touch of irony that we just read this article as my housemate and I just relaxed to a blockbuster movie about magic called the illusionist. It was not great, but it did prompt a conversation about how come people are so facinated by magic. It makes sense that the great magicians had such insight to peoples psyches as they seem to all factor in how the common brain would react to a situation and alter it. We talked about how we are creatures of habit, and when someone comes in front of us to show us such a divergence from this habit, it is full of so much awe. The irony of the article it that the magic is using our habit of memory to trick us. And then we are amazed. In short, we are so backwards.