To stop and smell the flowers.
How we generate meaning and knowledge out of the physical world is through our senses. What we see, touch, smell, hear, and taste (all in combination, all of the time) creates memory and identity, and without our senses and our ability to process them into thoughts, we would have nothing. This is obvious.
Here comes the college student, so bare with me.
Our senses also shape identity in a larger sense - communal, cultural, national, whatever - because the materials we surround ourselves with are shared sensory experiences. Those in power choose what we experience by manipulating the market: think of all the sense-memory that would be lost if, for example, they stopped making your favorite cereal. While it seems trivial, think of all that would come to mind if you ate the cereal thirty years from now after not having had it for that long; you'd remember the way you felt eating it as a kid, the time and place where you'd eat it, the regular everyday events that took place before and after your eating the cereal, &c. We underestimate the value of taste in creating meaning; in the US, things come and go all the time. Our little histories are comprised of sensory memories tied to things that are, in large part, not controlled or created by us.
This makes me uncomfortable. We don't live with a richness that allows us to have deep foundations in our sensory experiences - our senses try to take in fast-moving material culture and become innundated, unable to process it all into memories that help shape who we are, and as a result the meaning of nearly everything is underestimated, taken at surface value, and we remain undefined, unmoved by things that aren't blatantly or overtly emotional.
Slow down. Think in metaphor.
Here comes the college student, so bare with me.
Our senses also shape identity in a larger sense - communal, cultural, national, whatever - because the materials we surround ourselves with are shared sensory experiences. Those in power choose what we experience by manipulating the market: think of all the sense-memory that would be lost if, for example, they stopped making your favorite cereal. While it seems trivial, think of all that would come to mind if you ate the cereal thirty years from now after not having had it for that long; you'd remember the way you felt eating it as a kid, the time and place where you'd eat it, the regular everyday events that took place before and after your eating the cereal, &c. We underestimate the value of taste in creating meaning; in the US, things come and go all the time. Our little histories are comprised of sensory memories tied to things that are, in large part, not controlled or created by us.
This makes me uncomfortable. We don't live with a richness that allows us to have deep foundations in our sensory experiences - our senses try to take in fast-moving material culture and become innundated, unable to process it all into memories that help shape who we are, and as a result the meaning of nearly everything is underestimated, taken at surface value, and we remain undefined, unmoved by things that aren't blatantly or overtly emotional.
Slow down. Think in metaphor.