Limited creation by pressure of society

015-Tradition 1
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

If you live in a society, you cannot expect to be able to do just as you please, as what you do may affect other member's of the same society. Life in a society means giving up some freedoms in order to gain safety and protection. However, there are some problems.

If you have a book, it might be useful or it might not - and if it is not then you have to consume some of your resources in maintaining that book - such as dusting and storing it. If the book is of importance to you, you might wish to give it to your children so that they can treasure it to, but if it means nothing to you you could try to sell it, give it away to a friend or donate it - or even just throw it away or burn it. Book printing companies destroy books all the time, just as any other manufacturing operation there comes a time when you produce to many things and the cost of storage outweighs the products value.

Many people will object, because they have made their image of 'book' to strong, and now it hurts too much to break that image. At this point, you are no longer free, either your book image is too strong and you must maintain them all, or someone else's book image is too strong and they will make you life unpleasant if they discover you breaking their image by destroying a book. You have to dispose of unwanted books in secret or be on the receiving end of unpleasant looks, gossip or even heated words. You are a criminal because someone else lacks the ability to change.

Why do people lack this ability, and why does it seem to get worse with age? Well, a good part of the pressure comes from other people and their poorly examined values, or from education. And it does not just involve books, but any concept that we have, and because many people find it easy to create unbreakable images, they are easily bent to the will, unwittingly, of people of malicious intent.

If you have unbreakable concepts and you wish to create something new, such as a work of art or a new project at work, then your solution is likely to be deficient in any area that involves your unbreakable concepts. Good, you may say, but only because you do not realize what you are missing - you can always reject something new, but only if first you are able to create it. At a company party the other week, a group of half dozen people who would never usually mix remained together until six in the morning chatting, a feat some would never engage in. They broke the unbreakable, and discovered that although they were all different, there was some benefit in being together.

Even temporary breaking apart of concepts requires practice, as does any skill, you become much more confident and more able to tackle a broad range of tasks through the practice. To many this practice is silly, as they cannot see the immediate connection between freeing up the mind and eventual application of the process. The company I work with is suffused with my solutions, which I have been able to create simply because I practice throwing away the rule book. I move against the pressure of society, and therefore I find not just the cracks, but the opportunities and the fixes they relate to.

I both embrace and reject tradition, and somehow my mind does not come apart in the process. I am not a slave to tradition, nor a loose cannon on deck because i can always find my way home. Here we dug through our wardrobe to create tradition out of modernity, not by just wearing clothes, but wearing in ways and combinations that achieve what we want to say. It cost us nothing but the time and wear, and no we have a great image of us to share and to recall.