Chapter 5: Probable Impossibilities
"The artist must be open to the wider truths, the shadow side, the strange worlds beyond time." As artists, we have to keep an open mind about everything that we do. If we start a piece and have very strict guidelines, then we will never know what could have happened to the piece. Some of my favorite pieces are those that I start by creating a box. I have done this with at least two teapots, and probably some other pots that I am forgetting about. I love starting with a box and just seeing where I can go from there.
"We invent new gods to take his place, all the little gods of technocracy..." I am not sure if L'Engle meant to make her readers think this way, but here is what I think this statement: I think we have replaced God with technology, and I think this is very dangerous for our world. I think that instead of paper bibles, we use apps. Instead of driving to someone's house to check on them, we send them a "Get Well Soon" text. And I think this is so much more dangerous than we think. Guys don't meet the girls parents before they go on dates anymore. They simply text "here" and the girl goes outside. We are losing our interactions with people, and gaining interactions with a screen. A screen that contains all of our lives, a tablet that we cannot live without. When it gets to the point of people not being able to function without technology, that is when we know we have a problem. My fear now is that we are way too invested in our technology now, that we can't turn back.
Chapter 6: Keeping the Clock Wound
"We simply do not understand time." I don't know if it's that we don't 'understand,' or that we simply choose to ignore it. Everything we do is based on time. We revolve our lives around the man-made clock. I wonder what a day where we didn't have to worry about time would look like. I feel like we would be way less stressed, and way less crunched to "get things done." I think we stress too much about the clock, and I think that's what L'Engle is trying to say in this chapter. L'Engle also writes "Perhaps one of the saddest things we can do is waste time." I struggle with this because some days I love just sitting in bed and watching Netflix all day. However, I feel so much better when I get up and clean, do some work, and exercise. I even find myself in better moods when I'm active. I think that says something about being lazy. Being productive is way more rewarding.
L'Engle talks a little bit about our freedom. She states that "A series of mistaken choices throughout the centuries has brought us to a restricted way of life in which we have less freedom than we are meant to have, and so we have a sense of powerlessness and frustration which comes from our inability to change the many terrible things happening on our planet." I think she means that because there are bad people in this world, we have to have laws and punishments to keep everything "in tact". And some people take this the wrong way. They see our world as a prison, where we are told how to do our every move. However, if we look at the world positively.. we would see that these laws are put into place so that we are safe.
I think the way your life goes, comes down to how you make it. Life's what you make it, right?
"The artist must be open to the wider truths, the shadow side, the strange worlds beyond time." As artists, we have to keep an open mind about everything that we do. If we start a piece and have very strict guidelines, then we will never know what could have happened to the piece. Some of my favorite pieces are those that I start by creating a box. I have done this with at least two teapots, and probably some other pots that I am forgetting about. I love starting with a box and just seeing where I can go from there.
"We invent new gods to take his place, all the little gods of technocracy..." I am not sure if L'Engle meant to make her readers think this way, but here is what I think this statement: I think we have replaced God with technology, and I think this is very dangerous for our world. I think that instead of paper bibles, we use apps. Instead of driving to someone's house to check on them, we send them a "Get Well Soon" text. And I think this is so much more dangerous than we think. Guys don't meet the girls parents before they go on dates anymore. They simply text "here" and the girl goes outside. We are losing our interactions with people, and gaining interactions with a screen. A screen that contains all of our lives, a tablet that we cannot live without. When it gets to the point of people not being able to function without technology, that is when we know we have a problem. My fear now is that we are way too invested in our technology now, that we can't turn back.
Chapter 6: Keeping the Clock Wound
"We simply do not understand time." I don't know if it's that we don't 'understand,' or that we simply choose to ignore it. Everything we do is based on time. We revolve our lives around the man-made clock. I wonder what a day where we didn't have to worry about time would look like. I feel like we would be way less stressed, and way less crunched to "get things done." I think we stress too much about the clock, and I think that's what L'Engle is trying to say in this chapter. L'Engle also writes "Perhaps one of the saddest things we can do is waste time." I struggle with this because some days I love just sitting in bed and watching Netflix all day. However, I feel so much better when I get up and clean, do some work, and exercise. I even find myself in better moods when I'm active. I think that says something about being lazy. Being productive is way more rewarding.
L'Engle talks a little bit about our freedom. She states that "A series of mistaken choices throughout the centuries has brought us to a restricted way of life in which we have less freedom than we are meant to have, and so we have a sense of powerlessness and frustration which comes from our inability to change the many terrible things happening on our planet." I think she means that because there are bad people in this world, we have to have laws and punishments to keep everything "in tact". And some people take this the wrong way. They see our world as a prison, where we are told how to do our every move. However, if we look at the world positively.. we would see that these laws are put into place so that we are safe.
I think the way your life goes, comes down to how you make it. Life's what you make it, right?
http://askmissa.com/2010/12/30/review-of-life-is-what-you-make-it-by-peter-buffett/