Humbling

How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.—Ryan Bingham, character of the movie





It is always humbling to know that you contribute something useful to individuals. Learning is an infinite process—it never stops. How could one improve his or her skills? This question is a frequent visitor in my classes. I'm constant with my answer: read and read aloud.



Reading is an advocacy.

Diminishing Line

I realized there's a diminishing line between arrogance and confidence, between innocence, ignorance, and pretension.

The Hurt Locker

You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don't ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older... some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you'll realize it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one. —Staff Sergeant William James [speaking to his son]

Colonel Reed: Yeah. How many bombs have you disarmed?
Staff Sergeant William James: Uh, I'm not quite sure.
Colonel Reed: Segeant?
Staff Sergeant William James: Yes, sir.
Colonel Reed: I asked you a question.
Staff Sergeant William James: Eight hundred seventy-three, sir.
Colonel Reed: Eight hundred! And seventy-three. Eight hundred! And seventy-three. That's just hot shit. Eight hundred and seventy-three.
Staff Sergeant William James: Counting today, sir, yes.
Colonel Reed: That's gotta be a record. What's the best way to... go about disarming one of these things?
Staff Sergeant William James: The way you don't die, sir.
Colonel Reed: That's a good one. That's spoken like a wild man. That's good.

Akira Kurosawa

Peaches can be bought, but where can you buy a whole orchard in bloom?
—Akira Kurosawa, "The Peach Orchard"

Poetry: Of Silence

3.

The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette

the blurring of terms
silence not absence

of words or music or even
raw sounds

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint of a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
—Adrienne Rich, "Cartographies of Silence"


Great Streets of silence led away
To Neighborhoods of Pause --
Here was no Notice -- no Dissent
No Universe -- no laws -
—Emily Dickinson, "Great Streets of Silence Led Away"



Silence is all we dread.
There's Ransom in a Voice --
But Silence is Infinity.
Himself have not a face.
—Emily Dickinson, "Silence Is All We Dread"

So tell us what is on your mind.
We want to hear the sound of your foliage,
the unraveling of your tool kit,
your songs of loneliness,
your songs of hurt.
—Billy Collins, "Silence"