Swan Lake, The Ultimate Sacrifice Story

Swan_Lake-Poster-1931

When I was about five, I was obsessed with Swan Lake. I adored the score and played the record over and over again. I remember attending the ballet, but it was the music and the story that truly captivated my soul. The music, written by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky between 1875 and 1876, is sublime. Even now, I can pinpoint where we are in the story just by hearing a few chords; the ending still brings me to tears. But what affects me the most — is it the music or the story? Here’s a quick summary of the story: a princess, cursed to live as a swan during the day, regains her human form at night. One evening, a prince, out hunting, encounters her and falls deeply in love. While court intrigues attempt to lead the prince to choose a bride and a malevolent witch tries to deceive him, these elements pale in comparison to the climax. Ultimately, the prince forsakes his humanity, transforming into a swan to join the woman he loves. Together, they fly away, a happy couple. Swan Lake embodies a mythic story archetype, echoed throughout fantasy and fiction. Consider Twilight, where a lover surrenders her humanity…

Musings About Time

sand hour clock

The past is gone. The future hasn’t happened yet. The present is a liminal space between two non-existent things. We’re encouraged to stay present and live in the moment. But who really does that? Primarily, it’s young children and adults under duress. Young children live in the moment; their time is now. A toddler of a certain disposition doesn’t understand that taking a nap now will make them happier later. That kind of thinking requires conceptualizing a future self and taking actions now for its benefit. Those concepts take time to develop. Children typically develop time perception roughly equal to that of an adult by about eight years of age. [(2021) Development of Young Children’s Time Perception: Effect of Age and Emotional Localization] Another set of humans who are trapped in the moment are people caught in disasters — be it wars, personal attacks, illness, weather events, or earthquakes. Like young children, these individuals are also anchored in the present. When faced with the immediate demands of a catastrophe, there is little room left to consider the past or the future. Typically, as adults, we find ourselves oscillating between the past and the future, seldom pausing to embrace the now.…

The Opposite of Play is Not Work But Depression

Rosie the Riveter We Can Do It poster J. Howard Miller circa 1942-1943 World War II

People who are happy are able to turn even routine tasks into play. Or perhaps it is the other way around — people who can to turn routine tasks into play are generally happier. We know that people who manage to turn repetitive and tedious tasks — like working on an assembly line in a factory — into a game, manage to thrive as compared to those who see only boredom and frustration. People can engage with any task by gamifying it. Yes, that’s why that word gets thrown around a lot — a design constrain that aims to turn monotony into a fun activity. The problem with gamifying is the nature of a play — what makes a game fun for one person might not work for another. For me, creative writing is a play of the mind, but it is probably a punishment for others. As they say, “it’s nice to have written, but it sucks to write.” But when I write, I’m free. It’s the most exquisite of games for me. In life, there are tasks we have to do and those we get lucky to do. My grandmother cooked dinner for our family for decades, as…

Setting. Characters. Story.

Australopithecines

Setting and characters dictate how the story will play out when told. The same story can be told in a Victorian setting, as a space opera, or as a modern day fiction. “Pride and Prejudice” in space? Sure! Darcy can be a dashing if deeply flawed space captain alien. The setting won’t change the story’s emotional tone all that much, but the details will be substantially different. Darcy can be a mage…or a dragon…or a merman…or a an enchanted sward in a fantasy novel. Darcy can be man or a woman or anything in between — it’s the character traits that matter. Imagine “Beauty and the Beast”. How many different ways can this story be told if the setting changed? Millions! In fact, we know that some readers look to read the same story over and over again set in another time and place and variations of characters. Humans get a lot of pleasure from repetition and the ending we expect (happy or not). This is one of the reasons that some people read exclusively in one genre — when personal life is complicated and unpredictable, a little surety is appreciated in one’s entertainment. People search for emotional resonance that…

Builders

Adventures into High Strangeness Header

Humans are builders. We are all given different talents and resources in life that we use to try to construct happiness for ourselves and for those we love. This continuous process of creation is not only quintessentially human but also the most common thing all animals do. All animals build, humans just take it to another level. We write and read books, make and play games, create and watch movies, paint and sculpt stories, weave musical ballads and landscapes. We are able to envision other lives and share those visions with others. I think that’s an amazing facility. We believe that we’re unique, as humans, for building by using our prodigious imagination. We don’t only build in physical and social realms, we craft fully imaginary worlds populated with people and other creatures. Perhaps whales, apes, or even other animals — the octopus? a colony of termites? — also dream up stories. It’s hard to know. I have always lived in my imagination. As a child, I made elaborate sets and toys to act out stories for myself and my friends. Our apartment gradually filled with paper and fabric cities, castles, and little animals made from scraps; I used to make…

We Own Nothing

Yap Stone Money

We are living through an interesting transition as we change our relationship with physical possessions. Physical ownership is giving way to a preference for virtual goods and services. For millennia, societies operated on a “favor bank” system, where performing favors for friends and members of the community built goodwill. This mutual support was crucial during hard times. Money and trade goods came later. Personal wealth evolved from physically holding valuables to entrusting them to banks. Today, banks themselves are a web of promissory notes, not physical reserves. Caption: Not all money was easily carried about. Rai stones for instance, remained stationary. Their ownership was determined through community consensus in the societies where they were valued. We store our financial assets in the cloud. Money, stocks, property titles, and insurance policies exist mostly in digital realms. Who actually holds physical stock certificates now? While we physically possess homes and cars (and even that might change), our ownership rights are digitally recorded. Our educational achievements and professional credentials are traded electronically. Our libraries of books, music, or games have transitioned from physical shelves to digital storage. Memories, once preserved in photo albums, calendars, and diaries, are now captured in digital formats and…

Fog of War

Faces of war

Once again, we find ourselves bearing witness to yet another war with a non-stop spectrum of horrific stories and images that make our souls shudder and our hearts break. It is easy to get drawn into a narrative of good guys versus bad guys. It is easy to find ourselves in a heated screaming fight over why one side or the other are the evil ones. But wars at ground level are not really about good versus evil; they are about survival. Regular people get swept up in evil and find themselves doing things that they never would have thought possible. War turns normal people into monsters. Robert Sapolsky wrote: “We judge ourselves by our internal motives, but others by their external actions. … When Thems do something wrong, it’s because they’re simply rotten. When Us-es do it, it’s because of an extenuating circumstance”. Imagine the great harm you might inflict on another to protect a child you love. Because our motives are “pure” they mitigate our actions — allowing ourselves not to think of ourselves as monsters — even when we do objectively terrible things. We are all good at rationalizing our own behavior. To overcome our natural instincts…