034 (1/52) - S is for Save the Humans

034 (1/52) - S is for Save the Humans, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I remember being quite surprised while teaching English to a class of university students here in Lublin, Poland, when one of the students told me there were no more philosophers. I cannot now remember whether this student attended the local state (i.e. former communist) university or the local catholic equivalent. Ah, Lublin - where communist and fascist universities abide peacably side-by-side!

Whichever, I soon discovered that this is a common opinion, philosophers are a thing of the past, people gaining degrees in philosophy these days, including professors, are simply unable to be philosophers. Imagine studying physics and being unable to become an physicist! I would not say this is a majority view, nor do i wish universities to become places of rote learning with carefully proscribed views. But - no philosophers? No dangerously exciting interplay of concepts and reality? Everything consigned to the dry pages of university texts like last summer's pressed flowers?

In my idea of the universe, anyone can be a philosopher as long as one takes the time to ponder life. A beer or two with friends is enough to trigger the philosopher among many of us - the results do not have to stun the world, they merely have to be perceptive. And since life is ever changing, especially those that we have influence over, the need for new philosophy is always with us.

My own philosophy, which like any philosophy can sound a little irrelevant to many, is always practical in the way that a screwdriver is eminently practical once you learn how to use one and can recognise those situations in which it can be used. One would not expect to be able to walk into a tool shop and buy the most complex tool and expect to know how to use it effectively without some experience or training, and yet the world is full of people flippant about the impracticality of philosophic tools they lack the skill to use. I would say that all philosophy is practical, but like physical tools, we do not all have the ability or training to use them or to use them effectively.

now i lay me down to sleep

now i lay me down to sleep, originally uploaded by nutmeghan.

Actually, this is not my photo at all, but you can click on it to take it to it's source on flikr, where you can read all the notes she has added to the picture to explain all those symbols down the left-hand side. Anyway, I have blogged it to show my answer to her image. First up is her comment to the picture:

i'm so stressed out. i'm not actually, you know, doing anything about it, like, say, working on any of the assignments, etc, that have me stressed out. because i'm also too apathetic to care. does that make sense? i hope it does, because i feel like i'm going crazy.
i can't take this weather anymore.

And now my answer:

You seem to be up against that old wall of infinity, nothing is simple, nothing readily compartmentalizes itself into easy-to-do tasks you can achieve one after another, everything is there, spread out, intertwined, just there, a seemingly infinite number of things to do in a finite amount of time. Is this what it feels like?

I had this feeling many times, but slowly I began to realize that this wall of infinity is also a wall of opportunity, it doesn't really matter where you start and, more importantly, that wall is feeding you inspiration, like to create this seemingly average photo with a built-in wham from the left hand side images coordinated with hammer blow texts. Would you, I ask myself, have created this high level total piece of work if you had been cruising through life on a dreamboat?

By forcing your thoughts and concerns out of your head and into some other format lets you see yourself and your concerns differently. My choice is to write things on lots of bits of paper, and then after a while review them and shuffle them into new orders to try and see connections between them I had never noticed before, or I take photos and heavily edit them and put them on Flikr, and then blog them. This allows me to pull things off that wall of infinity, process them and then I can look at them and think about each separately.

Funnily enough, it does put some money in the bank - by practicing creativity in this way it gives me practice in seeing things in different ways I can solve problems other people cannot - because they rely on tradition, on learnt knowledge, while I rely on all of me and my experience. Everything relates somewhere, and every year I earn some kind of bonus for solving work problems in new ways. Life is still hard, but it helps to learn your way to using those 'negative' feelings as an opportunity to create.

So-called negativity is a great route to creativity!