October 18, 2008
Failure can spur you on
Yup, I recently rediscovered the fact failure motivates me like nothing else can.
I’ve never really had much interest in growing plants. Until I killed a couple of money plants recently. Very stupid, really, I overwatered them. So stupid that that made me determined to redeem myself. Spurred me on look up how to make plants thrive, and why they die.
I’m slowly growing different plants – chilli, more money plants (epipremnum), a grass-like plant that I don’t know the name of… and I’m trying to grow mint.
And the best thing? I’m actually enjoying watching the different plants grow. And I found that it’s much more rewarding to grow a plant from seed and cutting. When you buy a fully grown plant, you’re just maintaining its growth, but when you grow a plant yourself, it’s exciting when you see the first new leaf, the first shoot coming out of the earth. Just think… I would probably not have actually got off my butt to start growing things if I hadn’t actually cause those money plants to die in the first place. No wonder many people believe that everything happens for a reason, even the bad stuff.
July 19, 2008
Are we lab rats?
A scifi short story I read a long time ago keeps intruding into my mind recently. Basically, the story explores the idea that we human beings are part of an experiment by aliens, who are curious to see how we adapt to this planet, and to changes here.
How would it change our view of ourselves if we knew our reason for existence is to be, in essence, lab rats? That, instead of being observers of the world around us, we are the observed? That our actions are being recorded, analysed, categorised according to some alien view of the world? We’d be appalled, right?
Yet, that’s what we do to other cultures and nations. We go their countries and label them and their lifestyles based on our own value systems. And we do the same to people who are not of the same race as us, or who are different in some way from us. It seems natural to us to measure others according to some personal mental yardstick we’ve constructed over the years, and to identify with our group (‘us’), and to classify others as ‘them’. Doesn’t hold out much hope that we’d ever live in a cooperative, conflict-free world.
Am I right? Or am I too pessimistic?
June 4, 2008
Rice, bread and a thought
I’ve observed for some time that older folks tend to love rice, and often consider the dishes which go with it as a kind of flavouring ie they eat more rice that the dishes. Now, me, I’m the opposite. Don’t get me wrong, I like rice, and I think it goes very well with dishes. I just love eating fish or vegetables more.
Anyway, I was sitting at breakfast today munching on my slice of baguette, and it came to me that hey, I love the taste of plain bread and plain cream crackers. And suddenly, I understood why some people love eating so much rice.
That underlined to me once again how often we make judgments on whether other people are weird or not based on OUR OWN likes and dislikes?
Crooked Turret 