Reminder of Times Past

I was trying to think of a good way to wrap up all I've learned from this class, and I wasn't sure how to do it. Then I remembered, I take tons of notes during class, so I thought I'd share them all with you and the thoughts that emerged from them. They are a bit sporadic, but so are my thoughts. There is also a Suggested Reading List from Dr. Sexson's Tracings at the end, comprised of all the books Dr. Sexson told us to read in case you didn't get them all! A film list is also there. I know I have a lot of books to read during the breaks!

8-27-2013

• "Remind people of what they've forgotten" -Dr. Sexson (from now on referred to as Dr. S.)
• "When soemthing happens once, it's chance. When something happens twice, it's coincidence. When something happens three times, its mythology." -Dr. S.
• "The things we close our nakedness with is our stories." -Dr. S.
• myths=story, logos=truth/reality, combined-->mythology
• "We are on the track of everything." -Dr. S.
• (here we shared all our dreams, I think Spencer did a pretty good job of reminding us of those)

8-29-2013

• "You don't know what you think until you see what you say." -Dr. S.
• "All literature is displaced myth." -Dr. S.
• "There are no books, only boring people." -Dr. S.
• Beauty triumphs depression-->but can't there be something learnt from bleak things?
• Theme: how do we make the past present again?

9-3-2013

• Why do I read into everything in life, relationships, what people think of me, but I can't read into literature????
• If you want the "essence," you go with the "myth"
• Rose in the western culture=lotus in Eastern culture
• Why must we compare every story to a myth? Why must we get the "essence"? What do the myths tell us?
• "Life can't do anything else but imitate myth" -Dr. S. -->Why is that? Is it because myth was once reality? We just keep circling around....
• Marriage is a legalization of rape...hmm... "who comes forward to give this woman away" -->possession of women-->one man gives girl away to another

9-5-2013

• Is there such an idea as over analyzing? 
• "It's all music" -Dr. S.
• your memories really aren't your memories.....?
• "Knowledge is not something you discover, its something you invent." -->does this have something to do with the collective unconscious?
• we create our own realities
• there are no new ideas
• "Unmixed attention is prayer." Dr. S.
• "Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough." -unknown
• "The great enemy is distraction." -Dr. S.
• What is really important to me?

9-10-13

• "All literature is displaced myth" -Frye
• "The stories of your culture makes you who you are" -Dr. S.
• Fairy tales-->romance theme-->why is romance so central in our life? Why are we attracted to romance?
• If it's all the same story, why do we keep reading? Why do we read new literature? Is it because it is something we can all relate to? or want? Perhaps because we need them to be understood and carried on, in a way each generation will understand.
• Why are islands so important?
• Dantes 4 levels of interpretation
• Literal: surface of the story, the actual story, the superficial level
• Allegorical
• Moral 
• Anagogical: the ultimate reading of a text-->the highest

9-12-2013

• **Don't look up definitions, look up etymologies!
• enthusiasm means being possessed by a God
• Ecstasy is standing outside yourself
• Epiphanipack: your ah-ha moments collected together!!
• Why I don't read into literature-->I expect it to tell me something instead of extracting the meaning-->I'm used to scientific literature, where it seems it tells you something. Really, I'm lazy, I'm a "lazy reader" (as Dr. S. put it). 
• The meaning is the experience
• How does the story tell us how to live? They're not just a bunch of morals. "The moral of the story is always the story itself" -Dr. S.
• decode the world before you, using myths as you cipher
• When do you stop "reading into things"? Till you've gone mad?

9-17-2013

• "Life is an imitation of art." -Oscar Wild  -->more than art imitates life?
• "There is no such thing as nonsense because we are always trying to make sense" -Dr. S
• Why do I enjoy listening to people so much? Instead of talking? 
• "It's all a dance." Dr. S.
• The quest for the Holy Grail is the search for a lance and the glass/bowl Jesus drank from (man and woman)
• What about the Qur'an? What are the myths from my culture?
• **You have to be really lost to get to someplace that cannot be found. (T.S. Elliot)
• Art of using quotation marks is setting up another voice in the story

9-24-2013

• What is it that constitutes quality? Can it be measured? What about in the liberal arts? How does quality relate to higher education? to the quality of teaching? Do we know quality when it exists?
• Euripitis Trojan Women

9-26-2013

• Don't ask "what's new," ask "what's best"
• **terror of the circle
• Quality: the idea that we do not "see" it, but "experience" it
• Why the books that Dr. Sexson chose?

10-1-2013

• Life is not a dress rehearsal!
• Schrodinger's cat -->superposition-->do we exist everywhere at the same time? Until we observe ourself?
• Up is down (Pirates of the Caribbean!!)
• YHWH -->Hebrew for God
• Genuine literalness is not symbols anymore
• The bible has authority because it has gained it over time. Is this how stories and myths work?
• **You only start remembering once you learn to speak -->this is why language is so important! 
• In the world of the sacred, the dead are not dead.

10-3-2013

• "See things transparently" -Nabokov
• "Sanity is a madness put to good use; waking life is a dream controlled." -film Waking Life
• Don't be an ant!
• What makes things memorable?
• Pay attention to the dead. Is this why vampires and zombies are so popular?
• Life is just smoke and mirrors -Dr. S.
• "Every answer is a form of death" -The Magus
• We need to visit rooms in our mind...every room. The interpretation of the dream is just another room of the dream.
• "I am vast, I have multitudes, I have room to contradict myself." Dr. S.

10-8-2013

• Elegy: mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, a lament of the dead, Greek word for "lament"
• *insanity: doing the same thing twice and expecting different results --> we do the same things over and over again and people still laugh. Does this make everyone insane?
•  theodicy: questioning the justice of God, allowing others to suffer. 
• De-sensitizing -->do we get "used" to it or de-sensitize ourselves to things like animals dying? 
• We are all equal in death, so why spend it in stress? (Calder's blog)
• profound simplicity -->this is everywhere in life I'm beginning to notice
• "When is something alive? When it goes on doing something" -Dr. S.
• Entropy of the univerise -->sameness and uniformity -->we cannot "unstir" things -->equilibrium
• If something just has one message, there is no information. Information implies surprise.
• *If you understand everything, you understand nothing. So are we going to understand nothing at the end of this class? What about at our end?
• When you die, your atoms are just rearranged. 
• Humans desire to organize. We purposefully disobey the laws of entropy. Why do we want to prevent entropy? 
• *If the doors of perception are cleared, then you will see things as they really are.

10-10-2013

• We are lost if we don't have the right words to say. 
• Romance vs. tragedy. Tragedy ends in death. Romance ends with an apparent death.
• "Death is not an experience" 
• Apocolypse -->removing the veil
• "We die on the march"
• Our shoulder hurt when we see something beautiful because we used to have wings!!! (Plato)
• We were all touched by the lips of an angel before birth
• **how do we get back to remembering? Because once we start learning to speak we forget. So we need to leave language?

10-15-2013

• If you are genuinely committed to a task, the world changes to help you with your task. Everything starts to revolve around the task. Lots of coincidences.....
• *When you are focused, magical things will happen.
• Laws of Attraction, chemical affinity
• people who read books and watch fiction movies are more empathetic because they can really get into the character or another person. They have more imagination, and the power of empathy increases.
• Answers are a form of death, but answers are placeholders (for the bigger questions, not questions like in engineering or the practical questions)
• "A theatre without an audience" -The Magus

10-17-2013

• Seasons are the circle of life and death. Fall is the season of dying, yet it is so beautiful. What does this tell us about death, that it is also beautiful and should not be viewed in such a negative light?
• We are in a boat with a slow leakage (Four Quartets)
• The point of this class: you don't have to know about it to really know about it. 
• What is the difference between a lesson and an experience? A lesson: it ends, it closes. An experience: never ends.
• the term "just" or "only" -->eliminate them from your vocabulary. It degrades anything you say.

10-22-13

• "An inexplicable ordinary place" ---> Bozeman, MT
• How do you remember? You experience.
• The memory is a creative faculty
•  *The function of the storyteller is to save our lives. Is this what Dr. Sexson is doing for us? How does Conchis save Nicolas' life?

10-24-2013

• There is a sense of humor in the Goldberg Variations, a smile
• Music is humanity. Different combinations make one piece (a code, like a code of DNA making up a humans genetic makeup)
• "An ecstatic desire to get weird" -Jeremy Denk
• There is music in the noise
• nobody knows everything, but you can allude that you know everything
• There is no place like home, and the only way you know is to go away.... -->T.S. Elliot, "we shall not cease from exploration..."
• When you stop becoming, you start being. You can only become who you are
• Romance: the illusion of death
• Bad things are often good things, we don't know what going to happen.

10-29-2013

• "negative capability": being with doubts and uncertainties without reaching for solutions or answers to the doubts and uncertainties
• In order to contain everything, you must empty yourself of everything you once knew or thought, become naked.
• Life is full of contradictions. Life and death, questions and answers, freedom and enslavement
• "You've given up everything in life to be free except your freedom." Once you give up this then you will be liberated.

10-31-2013

• "You cannot stir things apart" -Thomasina, Arcadia
• "Disorder out of disorder into disorder" -Septimus, Arcadia
• "A mind in chaos suspected in genius" -from Arcadia

11-5-2013

• "It's not what you know, its wanting to know" -Hannah, Arcadia

11-11-2013

• "The better you understand freedom, the less you possess it." -from Jonah's project
• We are all simultaneously free and not free.
• Categories cloud our vision and perspective of freedom.
• Freedom is breaking the shelters in our head down and rebuilding them.
• We must absorb the dreamworld into our life. Don't analyze dreams, use them to help breakdown the social norms and prejudices we put on ourselves. The dreamworld doesn't let us have any prejudices. 

11-14-2013

• "Fast forward to the past" -Alaine
• What's so wrong with being an introvert?
• The world wants you to do so much, but you want to do so much for the world. 
• Genius: sophistication + primality 
• One thing is certain: we all feel pain
• vulnerability -->we are strongest when we are most vulnerable, when we've stripped away all our defenses and no longer have control
• remove all your defenses and protection, become naked, see what you need
• "Reason not the need if only to be warm we're gorgeous" -Shakespeare
• Thermodynamics:
• 1st law: all energy is conserved
• 2nd law: useful energy decreases, disorder always increases
• Relating 2 different subjects together that seem completely unrelated make them romantic

11-19-2013

• "To be is to be vulnerable."
• "Emotions are stories in my head" -Rose
• "I am my own myth" -Rose
• Are we at the mercy of our chemicals? Do we have any power? 
• "Everything fell together and I fell apart" -Rose
• When you learn, your nerves physically change and make new connections
• Emotions connect you to each other, they're more powerful than what you do
• fear of the formula
• cycle of connect and disconnect
• "Given things as they are, how shall we live our life?" -Annie Dillard
• Chaos requires 3 things:
• differences (butterfly effect)
• topographical mixing
• order
• the only thing that is more impossible of how the universe formed is the inevitability of it
• the water and the wave: both are represented in music
• Fuck you rule: when you around people you know, its both disrespectful (at first) but also shows how much respect we have. -->swearing shows how civilized we are
• Sex is the middle finger to chaos
• the literal turning back into the cosmological creates the smile

11-21-2013

• Tarot cards!!!!
• drawing is a tool, not a product
• who controls our past? 
• In some sense, this whole class is about how to read a text. Our bias shows through, whether we like it or not. 

11-26-2013

• We teach our children through stories
• science lacks introspection. Science seeks to understand the world, literature seeks to understand humanity
• Music is both introspection and retrospection. Music is the language of the collective unconscious
• "Truth is a mobile army of metaphors" -Niche
• "If you want to do art, do art. Life will imitate your work" -Carol
• When a poem is written down it is a ghost of a poem. Writing immortalizes things, but really it buries it. You see things first when they're dead.
• "He who speaks doe snot know, and he who knows does not speak" -Dow de Ching
• recursion and self-reference
• Smile -->when one glimpses the madness of reality
• 2 types of madness
• Divine: what lies at the center
• Reference: when once references itself
• The energy of life and sound are extremely closely related
• Theme and variation is a way in which to glimpse the madness
• *Find the still point of the turning world

After all that, I think I'm finally starting to get it. But, as Alaine said, I simply just can't put it into words. It reminds me of when Dr. Sexson asks what Logan thinks about something, and he just has this huge smile on his face, but can't quite get the words to describe it. I think he gets it. I'm not sure if this means I get it too, but it's a start I guess. The first quote I wrote down from this class is one of Dr. Sexson's. He said "Remind people of what they've forgotten." This class has reminded me and taught me how to look at every angle, pay attention to the details, experience dreams, read into something as far as I can, catch the coincidences in life, and so much more. Dr. Sexson also said once "There is no such thing as nonsense because we are always trying to make sense." Several times I found myself saying, "that's nonsense, how could that be true?" and now I realize that he was so right (as usual). There is something out there to read, discover, invent, see, listen to, or write that will make it all make sense. And to not be afraid that it doesn't make sense at the moment. I used to hate it when I didn't understand something, or worse, couldn't seem to get any sort of handle on it. But now, I'm not afraid to not know, to not understand, because I know eventually it will click. 

I wanted this to be sort of a journal for the entire class; a glimpse into everything we learned this semester. I really can't adequately put all I've discovered into one blog, but maybe if we combined all our blogs? I think I'm finally starting to realize what it's all about, thanks to this class. I cannot describe how this class has affected me and changed the way I look at education and life in general (I almost wrote "just" before life in that sentence). In no other course have I felt the emotions that I feel everyday as a result of class, reading each persons blogs, and the texts we've read this semester. Thank you everyone for making this class an experience I will remember the rest of my life.

Suggested Reading List from Dr. Sexson's Tracings Seminar

1. Surfaces and Essences-Douglas Hofstadter
2. Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov's Puzzles, Codes, "Signs and Symbols"-Yuri Leving
3. The Divine Comedy-Dante Alighieri
4. Beatrice and Virgil-Yann Martel
5. Lolita-Vladimir Nabokov
6. Palefire-Nabokov
7. Literature and the Gods-Roberto Calasso
8. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance-Robert Pirsig
9. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa-Jan Potocki
10. Lament of the Dead-James Hillman, Sonu Shamdasani
11. The Idiot-Dostoyevsky
12. The Storyteller-Mario Llosa
13. Don Quixote-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
14. The Idea of the Holy-R. Otto
15. The Monologue- Novalis
16. Essay: "The Geography of Imagination"
17. The Ebony Tower-Fowles
18. The User Illusion-Tor Norretranders
19. Poem: "Aros, The Bittersweet"

Suggested Film List from Dr. Sexson's Tracings Seminar

1. Dead Man
2. The Man Who Fell to Earth
3. Waking Life
4. Last Year in Marienbad
5. Black Orpheus
6. 32 Variations of Glenn Gould
7. Little Big Man
8. Hiroshima Monomore

Listen to:

1. 1955 Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould
2. Quartet for the End of Time

Final Paper: The Smile of Freedom

                 “It is because there is freedom that there is the smile.” This passage from the novel The Magus by John Fowles (445) completely startled me. I read it over and over again, trying to figure out what it meant. What freedom? Why is there a smile? It reminded me of another passage from the same novel when the character Conchis is describing a stone bust. The most significant quality the bust possesses is not a chiseled face or deep-set eyes, but its smile. “That is the truth. Not the hammer and sickle. Not the stars and stripes. Not the cross. Not the sun. Not gold. Not yin and yan. But the smile” (150).

                At first, these quotes startled me with their simplicity. The smile of truth; the smile of freedom. I love to smile, and I think a smile can mean much more than people often think. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I believe a smile is worth more. I wanted to find out what exactly the meaning of a smile was, hence this project. I chose to focus on a series of questions: What is a smile of freedom? When does a smile of freedom appear? When can it appear?

                These questions dive into the cosmological and anagogical interpretations, but the literal interpretation becomes the anagogical, so it is still important. The smile is the most biologically uniform facial expression. It only takes one muscle to smile, whereas frowning takes several more. The smile is such a fundamental expression that ultrasounds on babies in the womb have shown them smiling. This suggests that humans do not need to be taught to smile. It is said that a “genuine” smile is generated by the unconscious brain, perhaps even from what some might call the “collective unconscious.”

               

A. Nelson Mandela freed at last

B. Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci

 

                 The only way to talk about a smile is to look at examples of smiles throughout history. Take image A for example. It is a depiction of Nelson Mandela, a South-African political activist, finally freed from prison after nearly thirty years. His smile extends throughout his whole face, tugging at the corners of his eyes, making his cheeks stand out, wrinkling the sides of his face, and showing all the teeth he possibly could show. His smile moves from his face and is carried throughout his body to the fist he pounds in the air. You cannot help but smile just looking at it. The image is powerful in itself, but also powerful because of the context it was taken in. We know it was taken shortly after he was released from prison, so it is literally a smile of a now free man. But is this what Conchis meant? What about the Mona Lisa (picture B), arguably the most famous smile in history? Her smile, if it is a smile at all, is much more reserved. I see her smiling because I think her eyes crinkle at the sides ever so gently, like she’s secretly laughing hysterically inside but can only show the slightest bit of emotion. But why is she smiling? Unlike the picture of Nelson Mandela, we have no context of which to know what triggered her facial expression. Many people have ideas about why she is smiling, if she is smiling at all, but no one really knows for sure. Does she possess a smile of freedom?

                To understand what a smile of freedom is, first I needed to understand what Conchis meant by freedom.  In The Magus, Conchis describes freedom as “the final right to deny. To be free to choose” (441).  We have often said in class that we can only be free when we have emptied ourselves of everything we once knew and become naked.  Conchis emptied himself in that moment with Wimmel of everything he thought he knew before, and was freed by realizing he had the freedom to do everything, to choose to do everything, or nothing at all. It’s really just a big contradiction. Knowing nothing, we have the freedom to think anything.

                When Jonah Barta spoke about freedom, he said “freedom is the act of perception,” meaning we never actually possess freedom. But freedom is inside us, often trapped by the shelters we build in our own heads by categorizing and quantifying everything. Take a smile, for example. When I was doing research on this topic, I saw so many ways in which you could “characterize” a smile as a certain type and stick a label to it, as if that gives the smile a certain meaning. Look at dreaming. If a person has violent dreams, we think they are a horrible person and must have thoughts of hurting people. The list of examples of this idea could go on and on. We must make a choice to break these shelters of categories down and rebuild them with new perspectives. Only then can freedom be released; only then will the smile appear.

                Looking at the pictures, do these embody Conchis’ view of freedom? I think Mandela’s photograph possesses this smile, or better yet, he is smiling the release of freedom inside him. His smile has everything in it: pain and hardship, sadness, triumph, passion and eleutheria—freedom. His smile is a realization of the freedom to choose. It is here that the literal “smile of freedom” works its way around to the cosmological and the anagogical, because the literal is the anagogical. But the Mona Lisa has an air of mystery in her, like maybe she is hiding something. Her smile could possess everything, but she doesn’t want to show the world that she does. Isn’t this a smile that realizes the freedom to choose as well?   

                Then I wondered can this smile only appear when a person has gone through a hardship, like Mandela did? Can anyone smile the smile of freedom? For this I refer to another passage from The Magus: “You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me” (351). The smile of freedom is a smile of realization; when you realize you exist as you. It’s all a big circle, as we know. What you are is what you will become. When you accept this, you smile. “It is not any more what you will become. It is what you are and always will be” (112). Can a person realize this without being confronted with any obstacles?

                I think every person experiences some sort of pain in their lifetime. As Brooke Wimer put it in her project, “One thing is certain. We all feel pain.” Some maybe more than others, but I don’t think we can compare one person’s pain with another’s. Whether it is a moment of pain or a lifetime of pain, we all feel it and we are all affected by it. And it is only after this pain that the smile of freedom becomes available. The key word is available. I don’t believe every person reaches this smile, because it is not just experiencing the pain that makes the smile available, it is what we choose to do with that pain. Like I said earlier, freedom is all about choosing. We can choose to let the pain control us, build shelters in our head, or we can choose to break down those shelters and let the pain help shape who we are, not define who we are. Look at Nicholas in The Magus. The smile becomes available to him at the end of the novel as a result of all the pain he endures, but he never smiles the smile of freedom because he let his pain define who he was.

                After all that pain, there is something else we must realize. Joe Schadt said in one of his blogs, “smile comes from the simple truth that human existence is fucking ridiculous.” Annie Dillard showed us that we as a single individual are not important in the grand scheme of life. Isn’t this a form of freedom? Is it not freeing when we realize that what we do doesn’t really matter? So how shall we live knowing this? We should smile; smile at the insignificance of life.

                To me, the smile of freedom is the smile of the collective unconscious. It is the smile of knowing and understanding the pain and passion for life. A fundamental realization that we are what we are, that we can only be, and we have the power to choose. Freedom is inside us. We must choose to find it, break the shelters that contain it, and let it go so we can smile the smile of freedom. This is the smile of the statue; it is the smile that contains EVERYTHING. 

The Water and the Wave

Yesterday in class I finally understood something because of Joe's project: the miracle of life is music.

Now I'm not sure if this is what Joe meant when he said music is with the sperm and the egg, because maybe I took it too literally. But I loved his description of music as the representation of both the water and the wave simultaneously. Music can be written down in a formula on paper, but the experience of the music cannot be explained on a piece of paper or broken down into some kind of arbitrary formula. Immediately when I heard this I thought of an experience I've had listening to music. I'm sure we can all think of a time when we were listening to music and some kind of transcending experience. Some weeks ago I attended a piano concert at person's house. The concert was held in the living room which had massive floor-to-ceiling windows with a view of the falling autumn leaves in the background of a beautiful grand-piano. When the man started to play (I think he was playing Rachmaninoff), I found peace in the chaos that is my life for those ten minutes. I just stared at those falling leaves and didn't think about anything; nothing else existed in that moment, and I couldn't help a huge, goofy smile spreading across my face. Now what I experienced from this music I just tried to describe to give you an idea, but I can't really put it in words, and no one can reproduce it exactly the same.

Relating that to life, I realized life is also a simultaneous existence of both formula and experience (the describable and the indescribable), which is why we call it the miracle of life. We are made from the combination of DNA found on chromosomes that we get from our father and mother. These then make up our genes that give us specific traits and characteristics. This is the formula of life. But this cannot exist without the experience of life: the making of a new life (yes, sex) and the birth of a child. The indescribable joy on a parents face when they see their child for the first time. No one can put that into a formula. But both the experience and formula cannot exist without the other, but that is what makes it a miracle. The miracle that is life. 

A Few Thoughts...

First of all, I have had a fantastic time listening to all the projects. It keeps "startling" me how phenomenally creative and deep-thinking everyone is. It has been inspiring for me to listen to all the projects.

The first that came to my mind when I heard Alaine's poem was that I LOVED IT! (That's what I literally wrote in my notes). There were so many messages in it, as it contained everything, but what I loved most was how honest and truthful it was. It was like she had stripped herself of everything made herself vulnerable, just as Brooke said in her project. We are not only are strongest when we become naked, but also the most truthful to ourselves. Because there is nothing to cloud our image of ourselves, it's just us. And I think we're constantly fighting the cloud that tries to cover us up (smoke and mirrors?). Why is it so hard to be yourself? Shouldn't this be the easiest thing we can do? Yet for so many people it's often the hardest. Brooke made it clear to me with her project. It's because to be true to yourself, you have to become vulnerable, you have to become naked. And that's scary.


"The world wants you to do so much, but you want to do so much for the world." I believe this is a line from Alaine's poem? In any case, it matches my take on life right now. I feel like I am at a crossroad between what I want to do, what I feel like I should do, and what I feel like I'm expected to do. How do you know which one to follow? I like the idea of finding a balance. Because that's what life's all about, balance, right? It's all about figuring out when to do things because you want to, and when to do things because someone else wants you to. I think some people tend to one side more than the other, but I'd like to find a nice happy place right in the middle. Not sure how to do that though.....


I'm an engineering student, and Spencer's project really resonated with me. I too find myself in some of my engineering classes, thinking "how is that applicable to my life at all?" (Other than that I will be tested on it later and it will go on my transcript which will then affect going to graduate school, etc. etc.) Yet Spencer found a way to relate thermodynamics to life and so I wanted to try and relate what I'm studying, structures, to life as well. In a structure, you have to start from the bottom up. You first have to have a solid foundation, which needs adequate soil to be effective. And you need reinforcement in your foundation to make sure it will hold up under different kinds of loads. Then moving up, you have the different parts of the building, which need to transmit the forces you put on them back down to the foundation. And it can't be too rigid, otherwise it will create more stress on the different parts of the structure. And it all works together and builds off of one another. You can probably see where this is going. We all need some sort of foundation in which everything can build off. We first had to learn to walk before we could crawl, know the alphabet before we could write words, ride a bicycle with 3 wheels before 2, know our mythology before we could look at a fairy tale, and so on and so forth. That foundation needed reinforcement. We had to continually practice each thing to be able to move up to bigger things. Then each new task we learned in life was supported by that foundation, and each success could be traced back to having that good foundation. Any holes in the foundation and we would crumble. Each part of that structure, of yourself, works together to create you. But we can't be too set in our ways, otherwise we become stiff and can't change, resulting in our downfall. We must be flexible, able to see different perspectives.

For My Final Project

When I was doing some research on my topic, I came across this and I thought it was interesting. It's too literal for my presentation in class but it's worth viewing!

A Lesson vs. an Experience

I had to give a speech for a fundraiser for Engineers Without Borders the other day on "engagement" and what that means. It's a bit unrelated to what we are talking about now, except Dr. Sexson tells us that everything is related........anyway I thought I'd share it with you all since my primary idea for the speech came from a quote of Dr. Sexson about the difference between a lesson and an experience. 

So the theme for this year’s Jubilee is the four E’s: Engineering, Empowerment, Education, and Engagement. I want to look at that last word: Engagement. Over the past years of my involvement, I’ve given countless presentations and talked about who we are, what we do, and how we do it, but I haven’t talked much at all about how this group affects us students. I think it’s a topic that’s usually overlooked, but extremely important to bring up. And this topic is not small by any means, two members of EWB actually did their Honors Senior Thesis on the topic of engagement, but I’d at least like to give you all a little food for thought.

What is the difference between a lesson and an experience? This is a question Dr. Michael Sexson asked us in the seminar I am taking from him. A lesson, he said, ends; it closes. But an experience never ends. This is exactly what has and is happening to students in EWB-MSU. Their experience with this club is never ending, and often changes how they view the world.

On Wednesday night, I started thinking about what I might say to you all. I got a little stuck, as usual when I try to write something, so I sent out an email to about 15 club members. Keep in mind this was about 9’olock at night. And within two hours several people had responded with fantastic perspectives. Now first of all, this shows the kind of support network that is created within this organization or perhaps that we spend too much time checking emails….) but it also demonstrates the wide variety of experiences members of EWB commence in. They were all of such quality; I’d like to share some with you.

One member said traveling with EWB opened his eyes to how the world can be enormous and intimate at the same time. There are so many places, each different and unique in so many ways, but everywhere you go you can find a human element that is fundamentally the same, which allows you to connect with people a world apart.

Another member told of how the EWB culture grows leaders by pushing people to take on more than they might be able to do, letting them do what they can, and being there to support them when things don’t quite go as planned. It is not often college students get the opportunity to take on the responsibility that we do, and interact in an environment much beyond our years. It is the support network that allows students to succeed at this, or at least the best chance to do so.

Another member described the joy she gets out of watching the moment with it just clicks for students. They go from being unsure of themselves and their ability to contribute good ideas, to facilitating meetings, making sure their voice is heard, and mending mistakes members before them have made.

One member touched on the fact that EWB is not a group of people that are satisfied with their idea of doing “good” for another person. Our members are constantly trying to figure out the good that is best for something they know nothing about. This allows us to be sensitive to the impact culture has on everyone’s outlook. The most important lesson to gain is to realize that our idea of “better” in not right for everyone, and that we should strive to make someone else’s idea of “better” a reality.

My experience has been a combination of every one of these. EWB has given me perspective on life and appreciation for the value of education, culture, and community, in every sense. EWB-MSU is not just an organization, we are a family. Some of my best friends I have made because of my involvement in this group. And I am constantly surprised by our ability to solve the problems put before us, both in the community in Kenya and here in the states. I’ve found myself often putting my work with EWB before my schoolwork, which has its downsides, but the benefits I’ve received go beyond all my expectations. This is what an engagement experience at EWB gives students. As one member puts it: EWB is an acceleration of the lifelong process of gaining a view of the forest. Previous to EWB, the focus was on a few trees and shrubs.