random inspirations

This morning Edmund's dad was talking about creativity (i think they were talking about some book or soemthing) while i semi-slept, about how the way to unleash your creativity is making yourself like a hollow bamboo. He went on to say that getting in touch with nature is a way of lettting that creativity be unleashed since when you're alone in the forest, you can lose the human persona that you'd built over your life and be like you really are, an unwritten script upon which the words of life and duty are scrawled upon.

Humans need borders and classification to make the world simpler for us to understand, such that we can partake in activities more efficiently. Our roads are straight, our houses have walls, our blocks have numbers, it is all one concerted effect by the human race to bring the world under control. By doing so we put borders around our mind, we remember norms and obligations and these act as confining walls to "creativity". The forest idea is much like liberation, lost deep in a forest, you feel free from laws and signs and order. You do what seems right, not whats been agreed to be right. So your mind can wander and move to places we usually contain ourselves from, where paths are not set we need not walk paths but instead we can walk in the vastness of space. In the presense of pure nature the standards of humanity vanish in the lack of humankind's work and we can start anew to think of solutions for our problems, expression for our feelings, food for our hearts.

Thought about lit too, my lit teacher said before that lit is not a useful subject in "conventional" senses, our asian sense, but yet its use was far nobler and far greater (of course, in practical terms, noble = pointless). We have use for physics and chemistry and math because we had to pull to pull from post-war crisis to present-time success and that needed manufacturers, workers, chemists. We needed doctors to clean up the mess of disease and lawyers to clean up the mess of crime, to set new and relevant laws and enforce them. We don't have great need for that now, doctors and scientists are a dime a dozen and studying to be one doesn't mean you'd get the job. Our stigma remains because our parents lived through that as their parents in turn lived through war and hardship.

Then what of lit? Lit is the study of life, it is the honing of your ability to experience life, to understand it. Everyone can browse the book of life, everyone can read its cover and flip its pages, we all do it at their own pace. Literature and arts in general is the development of that inbuilt ability so that instead of merely browsing through life, we can read it beyond its words, to see the details in its entirety and the entirety in the details. Lit is opening your mind to the actions of others, the actions of ourselves, it is the ability to understand it according to how you have experienced it.

Lit is not a sure-shot subject that works wonders for everyone. Everybody learns something different in lit, the words and texts and quotes may generally be the same, but the real lesson is how to view life. It is not a subject, it is the development of your personality, of your beliefs and your perception. Pursued properly, it can fulfill the true purpose of "education", to teach one to learn.

Lit is good. Chem sucks. Maths sucks. Econs a bitch.

I don't take lit. =(