It difficult sometimes to grab who you are with your hand, flip it into your palm and be able to rotate it in your hand. I've realized that perhaps the reason for this is because I am transient in a big way. Who I am is transient, and honestly I've come to realize that who I am is the combination of me with my environment. The core self, if she does exist in my mind, doesn't exist in reality, for it is my actions, my thoughts with regard to the reality around me that actually plays in this world, that lives and breathes in this world.
So why is all this important? I guess this first year, this year, I plan to learn. I plan to reassess and redetermine who it is that I am through my experiences. And also because I have an idea of who I am now; an developing idea if you will. A start incubated by a rich last four years and two important years of intricate and brilliant people and opportunities. I've built a self, and feel less fragile, less transient because of it, less permeable to my environment and more aware of how it acts, how it functions, the beauty and challenges within them.
So what am I doing here? In this empty space? I am here to work through my thoughts the way that I worked through physics problems. It is perhaps through writing things down that I can systemically run through new thoughts - if anything it will be fun to challenge myself with theories, philosophies, and ideologies. To have them teach me more about how I see things currently, and other ways to see things. So here I plan to explore. To learn rigorously. To lead a purposeful and exploratory existence this year. And to build a room of my own here.
So today I am reading about the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric and the assumption under which it operates that the universe looks the same everywhere, in all directions (isotropic). But what is interesting is that this is hugely untrue on small scales.
And I am also working on hydrating a polymer and understanding what ratio of cationic polymer and anionic surfactant will lead to a more ordered structure.
One last thing for this year: I will be honest and straight forward about what I am learning (it's important to be honest with yourself about how much you know).
Super excited that you're blog-o-blogging :)
ReplyDeleteInterested re what you mean by "permeable to the environment"...it's a constant effort to try to get a handle on who we actually are, independent of all the stuff around us, but I'm starting to wonder if that concept actually makes any sense. Maybe we can only be defined in relation to our environments (in how we act and react and learn and feel and compare), and this elusive "sense of self" that people talk about is really just an overlay of an infinite number of contexts and an infinite number of selves within them.
I'm not sure if that makes any sense at all...
That makes a lot of sense! I think we are who we are in our environment. Hmm...while we operate on the world, the world also at the same time operates on us..I like the thought of it as a labyrinth in that when we enter the labyrinth outside, what makes the labyrinth challenging is because we have to navigate the labyrinth inside as well. Who we are is constantly shifting as we navigate, I think every second we are changing our world views and ultimately who we are and I think similarly, we then also impact the world that we live in. But in this way, while our explorations lay on new layers constantly, I still believe in a strange way in the "core self" in that there are certain things that we can't attribute to our environment like our love of certain things...and it is that core self, that part of us that we can't explain or attribute, that we seek to understand. Hopefully this made some sense...we can talk more about it soon!
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