AN: I put Y instead of I in happiness because of the movie and how it changed the way I saw a few things. Always thinking about “I” is not happiness… that’s being self centered.
Welcome to the last task. This one is pretty easy!
“Happiness is … ”
Complete the sentence and grow it. Keep it a maximum of five hundred words or less.
Happiness is … being profoundly disappointed in society’s definition of happiness which is akin to individualistic consumerism and making a conscious decision to move away from that mindset to look for something more in life.
What I wish to seek out is good company.
No not this kind of friend
Along with self sufficiency.
and great analysis:
Happiness= good company+ self sufficiency+ great analysis.
This is perhaps the most interesting challenge of IBMC’s repertoire of tasks. I suggest everyone give this a shot…
As a baby everything around is new to them. They slowly learn things by keenly observing how each and everything is done. It’s a pleasure to watch a baby learn new things. They learn that they need to cry to get something. They learn that they need to put forward their hands to reach out for something. Many such slow incremental things accumulate in order.
Now the task is if you were to see something with a fresh new perspective, what would it be? Give a baby step to something and explore this new perception and dimension with your engaging thoughts. You can give a fresh meaning to a new word, sentence, concept or anything weird or meaningful.
The word comes originally from Charles Dickens, who used it in his abandoned autobiography. He was sitting in a London cafe one day and noticed that “Moor-eeffoc” is “coffee room” spelled backwards; Dickens was looking at the establishment’s name from the “wrong” side of the window. G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien later used “mooreeffoc” in print to mean something suddenly seen in a strangely new way. (You might say that David Lynch films are full of mooreeffoc places, objects, and people.)
The idea of incremental albeit continuous good change is followed by the Japanese, they call it Kai (good) Zen (change). It was coined in the book of the same name written by author Masaaki Imai.
If I could actively seek out something to see in a fresh new perspective it would be school and the joy of learning. My experience with school is like a complex number: it takes effort to get to the root of it as it is negative. I have to “Imagine” a way to get to the bottom of the problem but the solution eludes me like an axis tantalizingly out of reach of an asymptote. (a joke in poor taste?)
As far as education is concerned school provides the necessary tools to extract information and refine it. After all, questions are typically modeled in adherence to bloom’s taxonomy.
This type of Higher. Order. Thinking (HOT) sharpens the mind in such a manner that people are more ready to cope with novel situations that their textbook does not give them a go-to answer for. Think about it really, if all you had to do to be successful in life was follow a textbook without question, wouldn’t you really be the best you could be already?
^ inherited wealth (donald trump)… or people who have inherited the wisdom of their forefathers without ever being formally taught(inherited knowledge)
It doesn’t do to only have a great plan, execution of the idea or the presentation of the information is what might make all the difference.
For the longest time now I’ve viewed the joy of learning as deriving a sense of satisfaction from getting the socially acceptable test score. What happens when one tests poorly? Condescension from peers obviously! Unfortunately as of late, that doesn’t seem to cut it. My motivation appears to stem from wanting to gain deeper understanding of how things work. During my years at school… esp. (year 8-11), I was routinely shut down by teachers whenever I asked more than one question. Retrospectively this made the process of learning a painstaking as well as arduous process. If I asked for alternatives to tried and true methods, none were offered…
Recently I came across the types of learning such as but not limited to these:
It is not fair to blame the teachers as they have 40 minutes to achieve the complicated task of teaching a classroom of children that each have their own strengths and weaknesses as well as individual learning style, though I would have appreciated it if they didn’t teach to tests and instead explained each subject in a broad scope so individual’s could perform well on tests anyway as they have the requisite skill set to analytically approach the questions and subject matter instead of just a particular range of predetermined questions.
What I’ve learned is that learning is a lifelong process and I need to proactively seek out what works best for me. As of this moment, listening to Claudio Monteverdi’s music while sipping a cup of tea and reading condensed notes which I elaborate or annotate is what works best for me. Failing to do that, listening to an interactive lecture works wonders as well.
You are going to enjoy this. You will pick a nursery rhyme and make a new interpretation of it. You are free to make edits to that rhyme and then give an interpretation. The only ultimate restriction is that there has to be rhyme and a new context to it. Let your imaginations flow.
OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO! (Dr. Suess)
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
Any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And
you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll
decide where to go.
You’ll get mixed up,
of course, as you already know.
You’ll get mixed up with
many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great
tact and remember that
Life’s A Great Balancing Act.
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)KID, YOU’LL MOVE
MOUNTAINS!
I have chosen not to edit it, as I like it the way it is.
People are for the most part free and responsible agents determining their own development through acts of the will. In the comic book universe, Darkseid pursues an anti-life equation which can force any living creature to bend to his will. In symbolic terms this represents the notion that without free-will or the ability to act of our own volition we are not essentially alive.
In ‘Oh, the places you’ll go!’ Dr. Suess educates kids about how they can hone their intellectual acumen and sharpen their wits to achieve their dream. It also serves as a reminder about how at the end of the day we have our own objectives which we set for ourselves.
That being said, it can also act as a cautionary tale about not getting subsumed into the wrong crowd. The advise that we should step with great care and tact, because life is a great balancing act is priceless. Our free will allows us to choose what to do, but at the same time we have to remember that every action has a reaction which if Newton is to be believed is often opposite and equal.
Furthermore, 98.75% chance of “guaranteed” success is ironic to say the least! Truth be told, the world does not owe us an IOU, besides, success is highly subjective, hence there is no one size fits all approach to it.
When it comes down to it, we’ve all moved a mountain. For that matter, it could have been a mountain load of paperwork and with a deadline to boot, could have been that volcano project in second grade or even a bottle of Mountain Dew.
All I know for sure is that the messages replete in this poem are pure.
You are going to pick up a news paper article. Either online or take a snapshot from the hard copy paper. Use appropriate reference for the article you have used. You need to debate and discuss your view points on the selected article.
My Grandfather was a productive man. During the Bangladesh Liberation war of 1971 when the field marshall’s men were looking for him to put a stop to his pro-liberation poetry and songs, he had hid in a small room of a house which was within close proximity of a remote village. In the midst of this difficult chapter of his life, he chose to put his time to good use. How so? With him he had carried an anthology of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, as a result he utilized the spare time on his hands by translating the contents of the compilation into Bengali.
Of course, he was like that for most of his life according to various accounts. Once, when he was abroad working on a thesis of his, he almost worked himself to death. Fortunately, his friend who was also pursuing a degree at the same university came to check on him after he was absent for a day. My grandfather was found lying in bed unable to get up owing to a mind numbing amount of pain from his back which was a result of poor posture. Apparently, he spent a great deal of time at his study desk hunching over one tome or the other.
Recently, few people aside from the intelligentsia of the nation remember him or his work. A point often overlooked by my generation is that innovation does not come in leap or bounds, and that history should not be learned for the sake of history… to be sure if one builds on the foundation laid by the past it is possible to internalize the wisdom of ages past and avoid pitfalls. On a positive note, I knew him to be a man who lived to write and contribute to shape a better tomorrow for his posterity, in this case, I have ruled that the intention was more important than the result. With this in mind I’ve found my closure.
Geist the magician is a character from the video game dot hack link. Geist is german for Ghost. His end is ultimately tragic and memorable.
This challenge has asked this of me: Connect the picture above, a poem about a ghost, and something about a telephone in order to come up with a synthesized writing.
“If two people were simultaneously reading each other’s thoughts would the same thoughts be echoed for all of infinity?” asked Mehmet
“I’m confused at times, should I sound alarmed, should I echo the feeling?” pondered Hazeel out loud
“What good would come of creating a recursive feedback loop of confusion? One has to accept that there are things one won’t come to know about or understand but that is not necessarily a bad thing. This art of mind reading is not a precise science, best not conflate it with thought policing.” continued Hazeel.
“Haha, that’s just the thing, over thinking and over analyzing creates problems that aren’t there in the first place. Take for example the paradox of the honest and dishonest guard. Why not just walk out the door from which one entered the room in the first place?”
“You need not answer all the questions! You can just laugh and laugh again.” concluded Mehmet.
“You speak my mind Mehmet. Alas, sometimes thinking that one is hopeless and with no chance of success secures such a result. Giving up is a surefire way to fail. It’s hard to think it is easy and easy to think it is hard. Negative Thoughts- they do what we don’t ask for!”
“Well said Hazeel, I would like to add that it takes courage to admit for all to hear ‘I knew it! I don’t know!’, Pyrrho he was a skeptical man and he based his school of thought around the idea that we should not let our cognitive biases or allegiance to a cause dictate how we perceive the truth… perhaps he had the right of it…”
“Speaking of Paradoxes, what of koans? At times we pretend to think on one, but actually think everything else! It taught me that asking too many questions can be an exercise in futility and it’s best to just ask good ones.”
I did my homework while still in school, when questioned why I replied that it was more convenient and the institution was like a second home. If a straight line moves along the Earth’s surface, due to the curvature it will eventually come full circle and be shaped like an ellipsoidal! If I’m wrong about being wrong does that make me right? A flock of flightless birds soared spiritedly into the sky before plunging into the Ocean like Icarus. The eye of Horus winked. My CPU threw a temper tantrum. Astonishingly the light of his soul flickered in the language of re-morse code. He had great faith that I had none. Is the objective of life to have a subjective or objective experience of reality? Is mankind kind? I wish that I had nothing to wish for. With an anti-midas touch he turned the inanimate gold into life.
What’s the story behind this photograph? I live in the concrete jungle Dhaka city, known to some as the second least desirable city to reside in. Make of that what you will. Small surprise then, that I wanted to get away from it all. For a few tranquil days I visited my hometown of Khorki, which is situated in Jessore. Like the lotus Odysseus encounters on his return journey which induces a state of repose in the hearts and minds of men, this home away from home quickly found a special place in my heart, and like the Lotus Eaters I had to be forced by a reality check to pack my bags so I could catch the next flight back to Dhaka.
Captain Flint was crestfallen. Had the clock turned back a few hours, one might have caught him beaming as if Christmas had come early, but now only a vacuous smile decorated his facial features. The Cap’n was bold but Lady Luck had not graced him with her favor. However, that was not enough to trouble him, he was a man of honor not a soldier of fortune who would sail only when things looked promising. He had given his word and he meant to keep it: he would live through this. Unlike his namesake a Pirate of ill repute, Flint fought fair and square, which is why he lost what initially appeared to be a nondescript duel between him and his mutinous quartermaster John Stone. Ironically, Flint now stranded on an island- a casteaway no less- could not light a fire with a flint, so he relied on the last of his matches, a perfect one that had not been lost to damp owing to rainfall to provide some semblance of warmth and commiseration. Reluctantly his eyes trailed the distant horizon which the smoke signal moved toward like a magic carpet… in a momentary lapse of sanity he burst into laughter because he thought it was a fitting scene which represented how his hope had gone up in smoke.
Gist: In essence, what I wanted to capture was how things don’t always go our way in life and how we may as well laugh at our misfortunes and learn from them.
INKuisitive Mind 