Mysteries of the Reader
Have you ever wondered about the mysteries of life? I have …
Sometimes when we get a feeling of something greater than "us", we cannot use words to describe it. The closest thing we can do, to express our feelings, is to use metaphors to provide a similar and relatable understanding so that people can comprehend it. Nothing on paper can actually allow a reader to fully place him/herself into the shoes of the writer.
Let me give an example. If I said something like "the leaf drifted down like a tadpole getting flushed away by the water of the river." This statement provides a great image in a person’s mind, but what colour is the leaf? How fast did it descend? What shape was the leaf? These are images that can only be created by the readers’ (your) imagination. The writer can only provide a foundational guidance to the core storyline of the journey.
So with all that being said, please take the time to "feel" what is written and not just comprehend it to have the full experience of what is the message behind the story.
The Gifted One
In this post, I actually want to introduce a friend of mine. It was a lovely evening in spring when we sat down together at Cappuccinos with steam blowing in the background. Cappuccinos does like to have some fancy environment as a restaurant to attract customers. Well, I must give credit to them, it worked. The atmosphere of the restaurant does help the mood of building relationships with people. Ok, =P now back to topic… So this friend and I started speaking about affinity which is defined by google as "a natural liking for and understanding of someone or something." Or "the degree to which a substance tends to combine with another." And the reason why we got onto this topic was simple, she was gifted.
Well, I was also gifted in some sort of a way as well, but I made sure to keep the main focus on her. She was gifted. There is a lot of moments in life where she will be able to easily step through. Let us think about it in this way, we all study hard in varsity. Somehow, some students tend to do better than we do even though we know for a fact that we spent more time studying on the subject compared to him/her. That person is gifted. But why?
This is when Toby starts to feature in the picture. Let us say, today we walked pass the river and we see an ant, Toby, struggling to survive after falling into the water. So we picked up a leaf and helped Toby out of the water and laid him down on the side to dry up and walked away. Today, we can relate to the people who are gifted in this sort of a sense. There is a mysterious force of energy providing them a helping hand to pull them up… but what we missed is that there is also another ant 5 meters down the river that is also struggling to survive. Why is it that we so perfectly only came across helping Toby and not the other ant?
This is when we need to start having an in depth view to what and why. People often ask me, how do I manage to do all this? One of my students asked me "How are you still be able to consult us during holidays and weekend and still be able to finish your own honours work?"
In my third year of varsity studies, there has been lots of groups competing to be the first group for our final year project (the most important module over 3 years), what is it? … What is THAT … that allowed me to lead my group to first place? Every single group has been working hard. Is working hard the defining factor? My group’s average for second year was around 68% where there has been groups that had 80% averages and so on and so forth. So we weren’t the most intelligent group. Is intelligence the defining factor? We were gifted.
There is a mysterious pool of energy that is … somewhere around us that gives us the wisdom to complete what is needed for a particular reason… but why us? Why Toby?
Why not the other groups? Why not the other ant? How do we become Toby? How do we become the defining group? Should we work hard? Or is there another way to achieve this?
I am sure this ocean will let me know the meaning of life once I am ready for it…