I have wrote before of the nature of design, of how it invades our lives in every way, of how everything right down the clothes you are wearing and the food you eat has been created by design. One part of our lives where that is most ambiguous is perhaps in the food we eat. I said it was created by design and it is true, not just of processed foods and food that does not occur naturally, but of the things we don't really associate as being unnatural.
For the sake of this post I define unnatural as being anything that you could not find in the wild. When you have that definition and you start to take a closer look at the things we eat we start to realise that most of it we would never think of being wild. Even the products that come from animals, like chicken, we don't imagine being wild. The image of a wild chicken for example isn't one most people in the UK could picture, the image of chickens that we think of are those on farms, or in battery farms depending on how much you pay for it. The idea of chickens running through fields is completely alien to us, yet wild chickens do exist, not so much in the UK but in other countries and they are not a case of chickens kept for food escaping - that would be putting the cart before the horse, the chickens we eat after all are descended from chickens that were wild and were caught and kept to provide food.
Go beyond the meats we eat and enter into the realm of vegetables, something we consider wholly more organic and earthy - when was the last time you saw a wild carrot? Would you even know what a wild carrot looks like or where you would look? Before writing this post I didn't either. This whole post came from the thought of growing carrots and thinking I would need seeds then thinking where do carrot seeds come from - carrots of course but I've never seen a carrot with seeds, or even a flower from which to harvest them. The carrots we eat today are descended from wild carrots. They would not occur naturally in the wild, not in the form we eat. The common carrot today is the result of a long and arduous selective breeding process that eventually produced what we eat today.
The word 'wild' inspires visions of feral animals but we forget the fruits and vegetables and all else we eat. The truth is that there is so much that we survive on that has been designed, even the food we call organic is still the product of human intervention, it may be grown free from additives and preservatives and pesticides et al but they still wouldn't occur in nature in the form we eat so can we really call them organic?
Failure
When I want to write, but I do not know what I want to write about, I just start writing. Even if it is complete gibberish, meaningless or a plethora of clichés mixed with stock sentences the point isn't what I am writing but the fact that I write something, anything.
I do this, because if you try to think of what to write and never put anything down in the hope that the perfect idea will come to you, then at the end of the day what you will most likely end up with is a blank page. This extends beyond writing though, into every part of our lives. If you do nothing for want of waiting to know what you want to do then you'll end up doing what you are doing - nothing. If you want to do something then you have to do just that, you have to do something.
When it comes to writing as I start to write I often think that something is wrong, or that something doesn't work, or that I would rather it take a different direction, at which point I rework what I have done. Changing things, adding more, or sometimes starting over. The point is the more you do it the more the wheels of thought turn. Doing something even if it is something that isn't worthy of your skills or your talent opens your eyes to what you want to do. Knowing exactly what you want to do is as much about knowing what you do not want to do. The more you know what you do not want to do the narrower the possibilities become until you realise what it is you do want. With writing this takes the form of abandoning various story lines and concepts that you know would never work, but in trying them out you often discover what would work better than what you tried. In Mathematics this is called trial and improvement, in life we call it trial and error, in either case the key word is trial. If you don't try then you will never succeed, yes, you may fail, but if you never try then you have already failed before you have even begun. As they say the only true failure is the failure to try.
We often look on our failures as things which we would rather forget. As things that are negative, that have no merit and no place in our lives. The truth is that the learning process no matter what it is we wish to learn, involves repetition, it involves accepting our failures and trying again. No human ever crawled across the floor as a baby, stood up and walked and never fell over. Learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to read and write, these are all things that we try and fail and try again and keep trying until we get it right. We may not remember the trials we went through to master these skills, but we do not think anything less of anyone who made the same mistakes. Making mistakes is part of what makes us human. Why then do we try to hide our failures from others? Why is it when we meet people we feel embarrassment about admitting the things we did wrong? No matter who you are, no matter where you work, or play, or study, or dream, or think, or plan, or scheme, we all make mistakes at some point.
There are two types of people I do not trust instinctively, those who say they have never failed at something, and those who always smile. I don't care how happy you are in your life if you constantly smile all it tells me is that you have something to hide and you are dishonest. You can be as defensive about that as you want. I am not the only person that thinks this way either so if you are one of those people then all I have to say is you are fooling no-one but yourself. At the end of the day if you can't be yourself and be true to yourself how can you ever expect anyone to trust you to be honest to them.
I do this, because if you try to think of what to write and never put anything down in the hope that the perfect idea will come to you, then at the end of the day what you will most likely end up with is a blank page. This extends beyond writing though, into every part of our lives. If you do nothing for want of waiting to know what you want to do then you'll end up doing what you are doing - nothing. If you want to do something then you have to do just that, you have to do something.
When it comes to writing as I start to write I often think that something is wrong, or that something doesn't work, or that I would rather it take a different direction, at which point I rework what I have done. Changing things, adding more, or sometimes starting over. The point is the more you do it the more the wheels of thought turn. Doing something even if it is something that isn't worthy of your skills or your talent opens your eyes to what you want to do. Knowing exactly what you want to do is as much about knowing what you do not want to do. The more you know what you do not want to do the narrower the possibilities become until you realise what it is you do want. With writing this takes the form of abandoning various story lines and concepts that you know would never work, but in trying them out you often discover what would work better than what you tried. In Mathematics this is called trial and improvement, in life we call it trial and error, in either case the key word is trial. If you don't try then you will never succeed, yes, you may fail, but if you never try then you have already failed before you have even begun. As they say the only true failure is the failure to try.
We often look on our failures as things which we would rather forget. As things that are negative, that have no merit and no place in our lives. The truth is that the learning process no matter what it is we wish to learn, involves repetition, it involves accepting our failures and trying again. No human ever crawled across the floor as a baby, stood up and walked and never fell over. Learning to walk, learning to talk, learning to read and write, these are all things that we try and fail and try again and keep trying until we get it right. We may not remember the trials we went through to master these skills, but we do not think anything less of anyone who made the same mistakes. Making mistakes is part of what makes us human. Why then do we try to hide our failures from others? Why is it when we meet people we feel embarrassment about admitting the things we did wrong? No matter who you are, no matter where you work, or play, or study, or dream, or think, or plan, or scheme, we all make mistakes at some point.
There are two types of people I do not trust instinctively, those who say they have never failed at something, and those who always smile. I don't care how happy you are in your life if you constantly smile all it tells me is that you have something to hide and you are dishonest. You can be as defensive about that as you want. I am not the only person that thinks this way either so if you are one of those people then all I have to say is you are fooling no-one but yourself. At the end of the day if you can't be yourself and be true to yourself how can you ever expect anyone to trust you to be honest to them.
Like
When I was younger, I wanted to be liked. I think most people want to be liked. It's part of growing up, we want to have friends and we want everyone to like us. As we get older though we inevitably meet people we don't like, people who no matter what we do we just do not like. It takes a little longer for us to realise that this is a two way street and that the same applies to others - namely that there will be people that do not like us. No matter what we do, they will never like us.
One of the hardest things to learn is perhaps the ability to recognise people who we should avoid. We all have first impressions of people that often grow as we see more of those people. The problem with taking first impressions as the basis for how we treat someone, is that our first impressions are often wrong. If you are in any way shy or reserved you will know from your own experience that you will find it hard to open up to people and that you will be acutely aware that the first impression you give others is not accurate. People who are shy by nature are usually not shy at all around people they know and feel comfortable with. Around these people they can be the exact opposite.
For those reasons the first impressions we experience are often judged and banked - whether good or bad we want to see more of that person before we form our conclusions. How long it takes us to realise whether our judge of character was accurate will vary - not just between you and I but between people we meet - some people show their true colours sooner than others.
It's natural to want people to like you, and it's natural to want to like others. After all we don't actively seek out conflict - unless you're a troll. Accepting that some people just aren't worth it is something that is hard, because it goes against what we want - our desire to be harmonious.
When I was younger, I wanted to be liked, now that I have grown older and wiser I don't care whether people like me or not. I treat people the way they treat me. Be nice to me and I will be nice to you. Be a cunt to me and I will be a cunt to you. Do not play games with me because I am capable of more than you could ever know. As the saying goes:
One of the hardest things to learn is perhaps the ability to recognise people who we should avoid. We all have first impressions of people that often grow as we see more of those people. The problem with taking first impressions as the basis for how we treat someone, is that our first impressions are often wrong. If you are in any way shy or reserved you will know from your own experience that you will find it hard to open up to people and that you will be acutely aware that the first impression you give others is not accurate. People who are shy by nature are usually not shy at all around people they know and feel comfortable with. Around these people they can be the exact opposite.
For those reasons the first impressions we experience are often judged and banked - whether good or bad we want to see more of that person before we form our conclusions. How long it takes us to realise whether our judge of character was accurate will vary - not just between you and I but between people we meet - some people show their true colours sooner than others.
It's natural to want people to like you, and it's natural to want to like others. After all we don't actively seek out conflict - unless you're a troll. Accepting that some people just aren't worth it is something that is hard, because it goes against what we want - our desire to be harmonious.
When I was younger, I wanted to be liked, now that I have grown older and wiser I don't care whether people like me or not. I treat people the way they treat me. Be nice to me and I will be nice to you. Be a cunt to me and I will be a cunt to you. Do not play games with me because I am capable of more than you could ever know. As the saying goes:
"It's the quiet ones you have to look out for"
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