Wednesday's Words - Week 1

Welcome to the first installment of my hopefully weekly Wednesdays Words. The basic aim here is to spur me on in my blogging with a weekly commitment, based around my thoughts of one of the weeks daily quotes supplied dutifully by my trusty desk calendar.
So then, here goes......

“When the time is right, the answers will come” – P.K. Shaw

I chose this inaugural quote out of the seven available to me this week not because I agree with it, but because of the rant which it inspired.
I am not a fan of this quote, as I don’t like mysterious agents being invoked that ensure everything will be ‘just fine’. To say that answers will come at some mystically appointed right time doesn’t gel with me as I don’t believe there is any all powerful being at work putting our lives together. To believe such a thing raises some seriously disturbing questions regarding people whose lives were lived in less than desirable circumstances.

Destiny either isn't real, or its indifferent

But I do see the benefits in getting people to be positive about the future, particularly when it comes to the uneasy fact that it is full of unknowns. However rather than invoking some predestined path set out for you in an uncertain future, I prefer to look at the possibilities inherent in this seemingly random future.
The late founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, once gave a commencement speech to a group of students beginning their tenure at university which I previously blogged on here. In it he goes over a similar concept to that which I have been discussing (unknown paths leading into the future), that I think really hits the nail on the head.
First a little background.
After officially dropping out of his university course, the young Steve Jobs decided to hang around campus for a bit and take part in things that he was previously unable to, due to course commitments. Reed College apparently had the best calligraphy instruction available in the United States at the time, and the beautifully scripted labels and posters around the college grounds piqued Jobs’ interest. He enrolled in the class and developed an appreciation for the importance of typography in graphical representation. His early exposure to things like font families, serif versus sans-serif and proportional spacing was something that Jobs would later draw upon when developing the early Apple computers, which were among the first personal computers to display text in anything other than a monospaced, generic font.

Yes that's right, its an apple.....

Jobs mentioned this in his address to those students’ years ago to help highlight the uncertainty of our future, but also the importance of what we are doing, and of not disregarding where we are just because we don’t know where it will take us. He summed up the crux of his argument in the closing statement of this portion of his speech.

“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.”

You need to trust in something, not because there is something out there working for you (as in karma, destiny, gods, or whatever), but because in trusting that there is something out there for you, you are implicitly trusting in yourself. Jobs mentioned it himself when he says that such trust in the future gives you confidence, regardless of what you ground it in. I would go a step further and say it is better to place your trust in yourself, and your own faculties, rather than in some possibly existent third party.
Don’t just trust in the future because you believe it has been laid out before you; trust in yourself because you are the one who will actually do it!
If the future were fixed, if there was some destiny out there with Mathew James Morton written on it, I am not so sure I would want it. If there was something out there withholding the answers from me until the right time came along, I don’t think I would cheerfully take them when said time did arrive.
The enlightenment taught us that human agency was where we should place our bets, not on some higher power, whatever form it may take. Trusting in foreordained events and personal destinies was so widely believed in the past that in the event of a shipwreck, people would clamber over whomever stood between them and safety, believing that God had already decided who lived and who died.
Accepting human agency as the driving force in our lives means we don’t sit around waiting for answers; we go out and find them. We don’t wait to see where our path in life takes us; we walk boldly ahead in the unknown knowing that though our path isn’t part of some divine plan, it is nevertheless our path to make, and our privilege to forge it.
I am going to close this post with a quote which I may have already recently mentioned (though I can’t remember), but which all the same seems to fit well with the topic.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard

I hope that you enjoyed this first installment of Wednesdays Words. I think it went quite well, but I have the niggling thought at the back of my mind that this is a somewhat lame attempt at regularity.
Please let me know what you think in the comments; I crave your approval!
MM

A Thoughts from the Antipodes weekly institution

I was recently inspired by my sisters installation of a themed weekly blog post (check out her Tuesdays Treasures over at Picklebug Designs), and decided to instigate my own attempt over here.

At first I wasn’t sure what I could hope to achieve on a weekly basis given that my blog platform isn’t really specialised in any one direction, nor do I consider myself having any form of expertise which might be called upon for weekly retrospection. So whatever I decided to post about, it had to be based on some quotidian thing from my life, and something I wasn’t likely to run out of material for.

In the end the answer was right in front of me, or to be specific, slightly to the right of me; my work calendar.

I have hinted in a couple of previous posts about the daily work calendar on my desk that endows my morning with a new quote, or thought for the day. Sometimes they are interesting, and prompt some (hopefully) entertaining ruminations, others are a bit less inspiring, and make me question whoever is in control of these things. Nevertheless, they help furnish my day with something to think about. The number of dull mornings where I have looked to my calendar for some form of motivation or inspiration, and gingerly lifted the previous day’s page in trepidation of what lies beneath, cannot be counted.

So with a theme decided upon, I then faced the formidable question of what to call my weekly musings.

Notable Quotables?

Wordsworthy Wednesdays?

Thoughtful Thoughts Thursdays?

Friday QuoteDay?

These were the first attempts that I came up with, and I wasn’t really happy with any of them. Rhyming failed me, alliteration offered little improvement, and my last attempt with the clunky ‘Friday Quote Day’ was just plain awful. Clearly I needed help.

I finally settled on the simpler ‘Wednesdays Words’. I was going to add ‘...of Wisdom’, but thought it might be more prudent of me to leave of this little descriptive, lest I don’t live up to the label.

As it is not yet the right day of the week to get the ball rolling on this endeavour, I would like to spend the rest of this post sharing with you some previous quotes that gave me enough pause, for various reasons, to actually write down some thoughts on the matter.

The outcome of these daily quotes are generally pretty foreseeable. It can be uplifting, at other times annoying, and every now and then it is just plain bland. I got a nice surprise the other day though when I noticed what I would like to think is a semi-hidden joke on the part of the calendars designer. I had previously lamented the lack of thought by the person compiling these quotes when they included a quote from a Christian Scientist nutjob; but this next pair of quotes gave me hope.

The first quote was an old classic:

“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” – Tibetan saying

We have all heard it before, and some of us have pondered the rhetorical question at some philosophical length (even though Bart Simpson clearly answered it years ago). So it wasn’t anything new and after reading it I thought nothing further of it.

And then I found this cute Tibetan Terrier picture

However the following day when I peeled the previous entry away and revealed the current days quote, I was taken aback at what I am pretty sure was a deliberate topical reference.

Here is what I found:

“There is no sound of one hand clapping” – Chinese proverb

Is it what I think it is? Is it a cheeky juxtaposition of a Chinese authoritarian quote after a Tibetan one, in order to show the oppressive nature of these two cultures relationship? I mean I might be mistaken here, but it seems pretty to the point. Though yes, I get the validity of the Chinese saying on its own, and how it is worth noting that cooperation has virtues worth extolling as a national maxim. However, given it was put right after the Tibetan quote dealing with the same exact topic, I would be willing to wager it was an intentional gag.

Perhaps gag wasn't the right word...

The second quote I will bring to your attention is this:

“A hedge between keeps friendships keen.” – German Proverb

You will often find sayings, adages or proverbs scattered throughout such ‘thought of the day’ lists which are attributed not to individuals, but rather larger groups of humanity be it nations, civilisations, religions or ethnicities. When this is the case it always makes me wonder whether the quote is at all reflective of the group identity from which it sprung, or whether it was merely a nifty saying that was happened upon by someone of arbitrary descent, but nevertheless latched onto by the group.

So in the above example, I question if the saying is representative of German people (though from what era it originated, I do not know), or just something that was first propagated in Germany (though its handy rhyming when translated into English makes me wonder...).

Growing up as we do in a society saturated with a multitude of media influences, sometimes one can’t help but link the nation of Germany, or indeed simply the word German, with the Second World War; in particular with the Nazi’s.

The scale of these past crimes mean that such mental connections aren’t surprising, though considering that the nation of Germany has a very diverse history, as well as an impressive contemporary culture, it is still rather unfortunate. Nevertheless due to Germany’s central role in both the major conflicts of the modern era, the Germans exemplify the ‘bad guys’ of the 20^th century.

We can see this re-enforced in many facets of our lives, whether it be their lingering presence in war movies, the endless documentaries on the History channel detailing those horrible days, or finding them sitting squarely in the crosshairs of a plethora of video game titles.

So when the quote of the day came up, and it was labelled as a German proverb, I couldn't help it if my conditioned mind finds some kind of ironic link between an ostensibly innocent quote, and the darker hours of the German civilisation (though I admit, it is a stretch).

“A hedge between keeps friendships keen. A panzer division causes a friendship schism.”

Then there are quotes that make me think, and then think a bit further. Perhaps a bit further than a quote of the day calendar warrants, but those of you who know me know I am wont to exactly that form of overanalyses. Like my previous post about Samuel Johnson's ‘Language is the dress of thought’ quote, I often follow one train of thought, only to quickly turn around and see it from a completely different perspective. And I hope this second perspective is all the more astute because of this.

Take this last quote for instance:

“I can do something else besides stuff a ball through a hoop. My biggest resource is my mind” – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

At first glance I thought it a good quote. It is nice to see an athlete praising the gifts of the mind, above those of their athletic prowess. After all one is more likely to be beneficial and attainable to the everyman than the other. By which I mean we can’t all earn a living as athletes no matter how hard we practise, but the fruits of the mind are available to all, and generally bring with them an increase in one’s personal standard of living.

Plus the man fought Bruce Lee!

But then (and perhaps this isn’t really a rethink, as it is a sign of my own innate cynicism) I can’t help but note that it is handy when one of your other resources, like stuffing a ball through a hoop, is able to placate you with millions of dollars while your precious brain can remain roughly underutilised.

But I must end this before I get too carried away. Tomorrow is Wednesday, and I shall hopefully have my first weekly post ready for you to read over.

Until then dear reader, have a good night!

MM