the importance of learning.

[devilsaprentice]

I realized just recently what the real secret to life is. it's about learning, but it also isn't as simple as all that. it's about finding your lessons. it's important to not take all learnings as they are given, taking the moral you find, not the one proffered to you like a spoonful of a childs food. if everyone learned only what disney meant you

Comments

[devilsaprentice]

well really, anything you might have said would have been related, in an obscure sort of way. you could have, right at that moment, began to explain the origins of the name frank, or the methods of parasitic fish invading urethras and it would have fit because these are the lessons you found. they weren't exactly the lessons that were shown to you, but you found them in lessons offered, and took your own knowledge from them. but, in fact, it is related. the entirety of villainhood rests in the fact that they looked at the lessons shown to them, and discarded them to play with the pretty box they came in. Lord Vader was taught about the light side of the force, and saw that there came coupled with it a necessary opposite, deciding that it was the one he more liked, or was more willing to sacrifice for.

this whole thing, by the way, was sparked by a line in a book I'm rereading. the character, who is not very clearly defined, as he comes late in the book and is somewhere lost in dietyhood and is thusly obscure, and is clearly not the protagonist, is personified as a child who has found two nests of ants, and a dead bird. he is building a maze directly between the ant colonies, and in the center he places the bird, explaining that he will make the two colonies fight for the maze. it is suggested that he knows a lot about ants, and he shrugs. "It's just like humans. If you can find out what they want, you can make them do anything."

it wasn't the line itself that brought the thought to mind, but the fact that this is the lesson I took to heart, not that perhaps I should not let people manipulate me with what I want, or that it is wrong and perhaps childish to manipulate people, but that this is how to manipulate people. this was the lesson I found in the book.

[mnarra]

That is the lesson of the book, isn't it?

[devilsaprentice]

not really. I mean, mostly it wasn't a lesson offering sort of book, more like backstory for a card game(magic)that I just happened to have.

[mnarra]

I think, if you are to be a mystic (which seems to be your path), you will find that there is nothing without its lesson.

You will, I think, object to the "mystic" label. Mystics can be cynical and calculating; I would suggest that you consider the name fully before you reject it.

Aberdeen is rarely wrong, and she first pointed me at the job description.

[devilsaprentice]

well, I don't exactly object to it as much as question it on a matter of semantics. but then, we could play that game all day long.