MetaCognition: Kite Runner

While pondering the Kite Runner and formulating my thesis for the paper, I noticed that my thoughts were like water. They trickle everywhere and are soon lost if they aren't caught and held onto. They go everywhere and all at the same time, so its hard to follow and pretty confusing... enough to give me a headaches. I usually have one or two clean main ideas, and everything else just flows out in never ending storms. A lot is lost though, trampled and pushed out of the way by everything else that demands attention. Sometimes, when I reach something that I actually want to remember the rain of ideas stops for just a minute, but thats just enough time to remember it, to write it down, to expand on it.
Its probably not the most effective way to use my brain, but I can't remember or imagine it any other way. When I was little, I always asked too many questions, usually before someone had finished explaining the last one, but that was the way my brain worked. How are you supposed to learn a different way to think? Couldn't everyone's brain think and work in completely different ways without scientists, and a great number of people, not knowing? I like my thinking though, because it works for me... I don't think any one else could survive very long with my brain... but I doubt I could survive very long with anyone else's. I wouldn't change a think about the way I think... some of my opinions could probably due with some changing, but the way I think is me, and works for me. If I tried to change my process of thought, wouldn't that just be another thought always present in my mind? Another raindrop? Just one more piece of the puzzle that is a brain, for anyone? Keep your thought process I say, but develop the thoughts being processed.

Best of Week: Kite Runner

During class Friday, it was mentioned that Amir should have taken control of his situation instead of sitting around and waiting for someone to hand him a solution on a platter. That got me thinking, shouldn't we all do that? Get off our cushy chairs and go grab our fate by the hair and tell it we won't be ruled by it's decisions anymore? Or maybe we should just stop waiting around for something to happen to us, and live life like we were going to die tomorrow? Stop waiting and start doing. Not to aspire to perfection... but to do things how we think they should be done, even if they turn out wrong. But if we had just let life slip by and not done what we thought was right, but wasn't, wouldn't that be better? To not make mistakes? To be perfect? Can that qualify as perfection, the avoidance of taking a chance?
I don't think Amir would have gotten out of his safe existence of guilt and regret and moved onto apologies and forgiveness without a push (or a very large shove) in the right direction. Sometimes, I think we all need that extra push from fate or God or whatever moves this world. But we can't just wait around for that shove to come from a questionable aly, we have to find how to stumble our way through life without help, because freedom is taking a horrible situation and making it a tad more bearable. In history, its hard to say whether the times create the man or the man creates the time. I say both. The truly great person accepts what they have been given as their piece of clay, and take fate into their own hands. There is only a certain amount of clay, and if you push it to hard the art with break and the masterpiece will be ruined. But with that clay, and determination, you can make something beautiful.
Even if you aren't written in history books, if you have had a hand in your fate, you have truly been great. Taking your life into your own hands is difficult, Amir couldn't do it without a lot of time and help, but maybe someone else could. Waiting around for the times to be good won't work, you have to bend the times to your own ideas... but also have to ability to be flexible when the times change. A situation can be molded, a mistake is never the end.

Change of Mind: Kite Runner

After a couple years, Soraya and Amir's marriage seems to be humdrum and almost boring. It has become altogether normal and stereotypical; thoroughly becoming what all couples aspire not to be and what almost all achieve. There is still love, but no fire, no hope. They hide their feelings from each other although they secretly know what the other feels, but still refuse to acknowledge it. Refuse to acknowledge failure. Refusal to acknowledge that their dreams are gone and forgotten. Suppressed under too many layers of fear that they will never see the light of day. Obligation, monotony, and near-utter perception drives their marriage, all of the components of really late night TV. I don't want to become the living clone of a TV show no one watches unless they have no choice. We laugh at their not so funny jokes and hope that something more entertaining is coming on soon; the regularity of their lives not phasing us because we know that will never be us. If it doesn't happen to us, who are those TV shows written for, who are they inspired by? Never us, never me, we say. My life will be exciting, every day something new! But we forget these wide-eyed dreams soon enough and settle into our boring and safe lives. Maybe we'll realize one day we should have done something different, but what can we do now that we are old and gray? Is there some special formula, some secret ingredient for living life well? Living life right? No, there couldn't be, because someone would have written that recipe. In the end we hope for a better lock, a special key to keep those wide-eyed dreams locked safe in the shackles we keep in the prison of our hearts. But somehow they escape, flying off to infect some new soul's heart. If only we'd stretch up, right before they were out of reach, and catch a just a few back. We could set those dreams free in our hearts and minds, and contemplate whether we were strong enough to break out of the mold we so easily fell into, and achieve a few.