Sculpting, Pottery, & Expression
“He doesn’t know the world at all, who stays in his nest and doesn’t go out.“
The first step in writing anything of note is to have something to say.
Our observations of the world can be split into a few categories. When we are young they are need-based. We exclaim our physical needs of warmth and food. We exclaim in simple ways these basic feelings. This is followed shortly by our emotional needs, that can be seen as a reflection or more complex physical needs.
Our first opinions we express by parroting those around us. We latch unconsciously onto the ideas that touch our needs. These are reflected in our exclamations.
When we are young we live through stories and our view of the world is shaped by them. As we grow we live our own stories and our view on the world further evolves. How we live these stories is so impacted by the stories we have already heard that as kids we can hardly disentangle the two. This remains true throughout our lives, we see the world through our needs and past. As we get older we can hope to start to recognize the biases.
We can say that each person comes into this world as a marble block to be sculpted by each passage with life. Stories we are told and those that we live can be seen as discovering the person within this marble block. But, this view of our shaping neglects the additive nature of our many encounters. The growth of a person implies inherently the process to be more than whittling. So with each encounter with life we are molded and chipped.
The underlying structure of the marble influences its interaction with the environment. Certain blows of the chisel are reflected off leaving only faint impressions, while others will resonate and strike to the core. Certain additions will not stick, whether from the mismatch of surfaces or the lack of a bond. Some additions we carry with us throughout life without noticing, their weight only seen by others. While some additions fit us so well that they become indistinguishable from the native form. The underlying form of each marble is unique and different to each.
Our shape, in-turn, determines our interaction with the world. Depending on our current form new changes suit us better than others, blindly self-reinforcing our struction.
The stories we live are just as much as determined by us, as the world we live them in. Disentangling the observer from the world is an important exercise to better understand the world and importantly our own shape, less we get lost in the convolution. But, too much and the observer will start to see themselves as separate. This is where the analogy breaks, and we must be careful. The observer must recognize that they are apart of Nature. Observation and thinking are not necessary for being. Though the former is said to prove the latter, necessity is not implied. Our act of observing and analyzing puts us in no-way above or outside of the world, but only in a different state within that world, and hardly a desirable one.
We are then provided with the conclusion to dive in and live. Sometimes this seems to be missed by the over analytical mind. But, for me, the answer is to do both. We must live and examine for a life worth living. The two were always impossible to separate. We should follow our classical reasoning and observe the world around us. But, we can not forget that we are living all of it, whether we engage or not.
Interestingly enough, I believe that the classical mind can arrive at the conclusion of a romantic life, in a way that suggests that both are seemingly arbitrary distinctions between a higher symmetry. In function, doors left unopen are no different from a door shut with purpose. The universe, ambivalent to our motives, only listens to our decisions.
It is with these views that I hope to tell stories from both perspectives.
I bring my own shape and the tales could only ever be told from my view. They will, unknowingly, tell just as much of my encounters as they will of me and all that has shaped me.
Though I can only claim to less than thirty years of living, I consider these years to have been filled with increasingly more life. I strive to say what I am thinking and feeling, and if I seem to stray it will only be more obvious.
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