4 posts tagged “philosophy”

I'd recenty heard an intriguing interview where Jill Bolte Taylor who is a neuroanatomist, talked of her remarkable experiences of having a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. She describes some of these experiences in the lecture shown below. It made me wonder about the things we think we know about the brain and the human mind, and more importantly, the things we're still missing by thinking we know! :)

Inspiration

Ever spent a lot of time going nowhere fast? Well, yesterday I was going round in a circle many times trying to find a parking space and not getting anywhere in particular. Normally I have no trouble getting parking spaces, so this was a rather unusual experience for me. It was only after a very long while that I realised that doing the same thing over and over like this was rather like trying to make an opening in a brick wall by repeatedly banging your head against it. It hurts a lot, and doesn't you get very far.

So at the next junction, instead of turning right as I had been doing every other time, I turned left instead. Lo and behold, after going down a few winding streets, a parking space appeared! Oh, you've no idea how grateful I was for that! Such a simple thing, and yet sometimes the simplest things are the best.

This reminds me of something that I had written about before in my previous blog Inspiration, Not Expiration about going left instead of right. One Valentine's Day in 2005, a monkey decided to take a leap into the unknown :)

Jump the other way

I think it just goes to show, we have choice but not control. And it's the choices we make that makes the difference.

I recently had a chance to go back in time.

Well, it was more in the historical sense, rather than physically undertaking time-travel. I was able to use the Wayback Machine's nifty little web-archiving service to peek at a few webpages as they had been. If you've not heard about this before, there is an automatic 'spider' that trawls through the internet saving pages it finds to its own archive. I think the web was a whole lot smaller back then.

Sleeping Among the Awake

I first started blogging way back in 2003 when I was living in Australia. I found a really useful blogging site called Upsaid, and it was a great tool because it dealt with all the setting up of layouts and webpages, so that I could concentrate on jotting down my errant thoughts. My blog was called 'Sleeping Among the Awake', a title chosen partly because I liked sleeping so much! Unfortunately Upsaid decided to charge for their services, and my blog was removed from their servers after I decided to move to a different site.

I was reading though a Wayback Machine snapshot of my blog taken back in April 2003. I had to smile at entries such as On-call: The Aftermath and some of the other posts because even though it was me writing those entries, it was a younger me. Me from 5 years ago. So different, so fresh, so witty! With the benefit of hindsight it's easy to think back nostalgically and remember how great the good old days were. It's only when I started to read posts that I had written then that I realise that some of those days weren't really all that good, and I think I moaned about them then as much as I moan about some of the days I have now!

But still... change is inevitable. We grow and develop. Maybe even (hopefully) evolve a little.

I think it's good to reflect back, and say that I'm where I am now because of this little incident or that thing happening. Some changes, though, I have found is totally and utterly inexplicable. I can't even begin to explain it. Take, for example, the fact that I suddenly developed a taste for bananas a few months ago. I mean before this point I didn't even like bananas, so why the sudden change? I really don't know, but at least going bananas means I'm getting enough potassium!

But then there's another change that I've noticed in myself. It's probably an improvement, but I can never really tell. I think that I'm now more happy with not knowing why about everything. I still have heaps of curiosity, but I can also just accept some things as what they are.

I wonder sometimes what the next change will be and where it'll lead me? I don't know for sure - but it's sure going to be interesting finding out! ;)