What connects us can be beautiful.

Connectedness, of ideas, lives, neurons and brain hemispheres, has always amazed me. That everything I say, do or think has been said, done or thought before is beautiful to me. This network of man, repeated across generations, centuries, time itself, in the most intricate and delicate patterns, is a comfort to me. I am not alone. I am not the first to fear death, or wonder what universal hand guides me. I am not lost in a sea of faceless, senseless entities, rather, I am strung together in a web of humanity so vast and consuming that I can scarcely construe its depth. I am apart of something significant.

Take poetry, for instance. How many love poems have ever been written? How many bitter sonnets, or symbolic haiku, or provoking free-verses? They are innumerable. And they speak, essentially, of the same thoughts over and over again. Yet they never fail to captivate us. Does it matter that they are repetitions of an idea? Not really. What matters is that these poets, like Whitman, Yeats, Cummings, left themselves behind for us, to connect us with them across time, so they may live again in our hearts and we may live with them as they were. What matters is that I have felt just as Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats and E.E. Cummings and they have felt just as I feel. And isn't that magical?

I am enchanted by this idea, and it is because of this that I am perplexed at the resentment of this connectedness. Ayn Rand, the great woman who spearheaded the individualist and objectivist movement, was no doubt an insightful novelist with provocative ideas. However, we pass her torch of individualism with such fervor and constitution that we begin to desperately separate ourselves to preserve the idea. Think of the myriad ways in which we separate ourselves: race, ethnicity, sex, religion, socioeconomic class, even time itself. And so, to prove ourselves as individuals, we end up splitting the network into even smaller, but still basically collectivist groups. We revere the individual, but hate the strange. This is the paradox that drives our society.

And why? The individual can be just as beautiful within the network, perhaps even more so. For the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and each of us, as small as we are compared to our world, play a significant role in the network of society, time, humanity. We should not fear or resent what connects us, for with it, we are brought together. We are united. We are no longer alone. We become whole.

Then again, what do I know? =)
-M

Nurturing Creativity

There comes a time for each of us to create. And with this creativity there is always the sense of fear, of inadequacy, of the lack of fulfillment. However, all of this can be cured by trusting your creativity to your magic-fairy-genius. Nifty, eh?

Still confused? Here's the wonderful talk given by Elizabeth Gilbert (you might have heard of her) that explains it all. So go! Unlock your house-elf genius!



OLE, geniuses!
-M