Just got back from my reading ethnography class, where we went over the book we read about Bedouin culture. In short, the book talked about how rigid/oppressive/strongly structured society is, women wear veils to show their shame, men are always striving for the ideals of honor, independence, and freedom from emotions. The society is ideally free from intimacy/emotions/self-expression. This is where poetry comes in... It's their 1 artistic means of expression, which frees them from this system. Everyone in the system uses poetry to express their own emotions, attachments, and other personal things. I guess it's really powerful there, ANYWAYS. I didn't really want to give a summary of the book when writing this, but what I realized between that class and when I was on the toilet just now was...
The key to being 'the most happy' we can be (in general) is to find a balance between self-expression, and the cultural ideals that surround us. As human beings, we share universal emotions: sadness, anger, embarrassment, fear. However, we only have limited ways of expressing how we feel. The most rudimentary of which, is our day-to-day conversations. In our normal conversations with friends, we don't fully express the full range and extent of our emotions. Occasionally we have deep conversations, which are usually our favorite/most remembered conversations, but conveying how we feel is still bottlenecked by the limited range of English words.
This is where art comes in... Poetry, painting, music... They're all ways of expressing ourselves that transcend normal speech. They allow us to make connections that we couldn't in a normal conversation. The more personal it is to us, the more powerful it is.
Unfortunately, we can't spend our life speaking in poems, and painting pictures to our friends when hanging out. Even in speech, most of the time we can't convey how we're feeling. I could never say what I'm writing now (word for word) to a person in a normal conversation. It'd be weird, out-of-place. MAYBE, if I were giving a speech or something. But, what I'm trying to say, is even in our culture, a lot of our feelings are suppressed. Especially in our daily interactions. If you try too hard to break free of these in certain aspects in your social life, it can be dangerous. Because, as I said earlier, you'd be thought of as "weird", the way we talk and interact with eachother day-to-day gives us structure. We know what to expect from people, because it's the way OTHER people act, and gives us the simplest, most efficient way of identifying with each other.
SO, what we really need to do is....
#1 Be normal in your day-to-day interactions. Yeah, this isn't a bad thing. As I said earlier, behaving like everyone else, is what makes us comfortable. It's the most efficient way to identify with each other. Laugh, have fun, be yourself in a way that people can understand.
#2 Do something artsy in your free time. If all we have to go on in life is our general day-to-day interactions. We're still missing something. There's emotions we have that are remaining unexpressed, that eat us up inside. Write poetry that means something to you, paint a picture that somehow expresses how you feel, or write a song that accomplishes the same thing. The toughest part is simply learning how to paint/play guitar/etc. Learning the tools to express yourself...But once you've done that, you have a world of possibilities open to you. Don't let those emotions that are eating you up inside go unexpressed. Let them out somehow.
Anyways, that's most of what I wanted to say. I think one of the biggest problems with American culture is the way we think of things. We label/stereotype so quickly, when we hear certain words, we associate them only with certain things. We need to learn to think more on a case-by-case basis, and realize that things aren't always as simplistic as they seem. In fact, I think that's one of the biggest mistakes we make: writing things off as simple/non-important/not interesting/shallow. Everything on this Earth is infinitely fascinating/complex, if we take the time to understand it and think about it.
A rock for example. Now when you think of a rock, I'm assuming you think of this little gray pebble or stone, that has no significance whatsoever. Now think about it deeper. This rock may have existed for millions of years, this rock could have been around when dinosaurs were still alive, this rock could've originated from the depths of the earth and through a volcano somehow made made it to the surface, or maybe it originated as a piece of a comet from space that traveled millions of miles. Anyways, I'm just saying it's all about HOW you think of things, the connections you make when you hear certain words. Don't write things off immediately, because of course, sometimes when people say the word "rock" it really does mean, just that little gray thing. Anyhow, I could go way deeper into this, but I have to go to a meeting in a minute.
But think about this blog post. Seriously.
No comments:
Post a Comment