Notes - for fellow diarylanders!
Guestbook - for outsiders!
|
|
2002-04-13 - 1:14 a.m. "You only get out of life what you put in", said my mother. And I thought, well, what's the point of putting anything in, if you get the same amount out? I mean, the same is true of a cardboard box, isn't it? You only get out what you put in, or rather, you can only take out of it what you've already put into it. I pictured "putting in" as a kind of loss and "getting out" as a gain and if the sum total of the excercise was zero, then it was just a waste of time putting anything in. - Later I came up with a marginally more sophisticated model. I said to my english friend NH, "saying you get out of life what you put in is like saying you get out of the stockmarket what you put in". I thought life was like the stockmarket - you put something at risk every time you venture out there, but in the end you do better by venturing and absorbing some losses because you'll tend to win more than you lose. But it was still additive, still cumulative, still a fiscal-based or object-based model. - Now, I'm not sure what my model is, but I think it goes something like this: you only get more out of life than you expect if you put in more than you expect to get in return. Note that it's impossible to follow the instructions of this credo in a cumulative world. If you believe that you're going to get less out than you're putting in, so you put in more because the model says that's the way you can expect to get more from life, then you'll end up expecting more and getting less. But... it's still too additive. In a sense, giving is receiving, and receiving is giving. You don't give in order to get but because giving is getting. If you give in order to get you're still just putting things into the cardboard box and taking them out again. It's only in humility that you can be surprised, only in nothingness that you can find wonder, magic, imagination, creativity - something that's a real gift and not just part of an exchange. - "The line is so fine between hoping and hurting" - Concrete Blonde
|