the title is inspired by the Haruki Murakami novel
Imagine you’re off to a soiree, eager to meet new people. You cross the threshold to enter the living room when suddenly you see a huge grey, creature, flapping its ears and waving around its nose. It’s quite a shocking sight, right?
The other people in the room don’t seem to notice it, like an elephant somehow did belong in a living room, as if it was the most natural thing in the universe.
You glare at the elephant and think to yourself just what an elephant could be doing in a living room and why nobody seems to care. It’s such an affront to your reasoning and logic that you want to shout out and ask what the hell is wrong with everyone.
This is how most of us are when we encounter ways that we are unable to grasp. It appears so strange to us that it just seems wrong.
When we see others doing that are beyond our comprehension, it’s uncanny. We see a fellow human being, someone of the same kind, doing things that run contrary with how we construct the world.
The thing is, we’re always viewing the world through some frame. We live in a world of images. We interact through the exchange and transformation of these images, as I’ve written before.
There will be times however that we cannot read each other’s symbols. We encounter roadblocks to true communication when images aren’t clear through the lens we see them with.
In such a situation, it is only appropriate to adjust one’s lens. Or when it’s your signs that aren’t being read properly, then you adjust your image.Just how do you explain to a 6-year-old where babies come from? You don’t talk to them about the reproductive process, but you don’t lie either, you give them a shorthand answer their young minds can understand.
It’s difficult to adjust though. It’s tough pretending the elephant in the middle of the room isn’t there. The thing is, you don’t really ignore it. What you do is to not mind the elephant but instead, be mindful of it.
What I mean is that you put differences in brackets.Recognize them as chasms to be leaped. Differences guide us in how we interact with each other. As Doctor Garcia once mentioned in class, recognition is the first step.
The abrasions caused by differences are usually our images and symbols sliding past each other, being misread. But we are more than the images we use. We can surpass, or if I may use the word, transcend them. Underneath all the layers of images and symbols we use to communicate is the human core; the being that desires communication with the Other.
Differences should help one be more sensitive to the Other but should never limit what is revealed in the encounter.In time, one learns to understand and accept these differences, seeing beyond them.One learns to adjust to people appropriately. Soon enough, the elephant vanishes.
In addition to that, it is through differences that we learn. When something new appears to us, we can either learn from it or not. We can choose to accept the difference and see it as a possibility of being, or reject it and confine our selves to only the things we've been acquainted to.
ReplyDeletejust as we had discussed in class, books open a new world where it can show us possibilities of being. But books are not the only things where we encounter something different and new.
Through the things we encounter in our everyday lives, there will always be something new to see, something different from the ones we know. And it is by recognizing these things and letting each one of them present itself to us that we learn new possibilities, and eventually grow as persons as we try them out and find meaning in them.
-Steffie Castaneda (C)