Fabled to win

One thing I've learnt is that you can't hope to win if you're afraid to lose.

In Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the hare, we are meant to learn the value of perseverance. But what we don't often think about was that even though the tortoise wins, he was still taking a risk in even running the race. He wasn't playing it safe. Imagine how all the animals must have laughed at him for being stupid enough to take on the hare! But fear of losing didn't stop him.

He had something much more powerful than speed, he had strategy. He understood the psychology of the individual.

Responsible consumerism

Something that has been weighing on my mind lately is how we can be mindful of day to day choices that we make, so that what we invest in will empower what will be most rewarding to society. In the wake of the Trump presidency, John Oliver brought this up as well. He urges us to put our money where our mouths are and to support organisations which will need help under a Trump administration. Instead of simply sharing videos on social media and clicking like, he suggests that we exercise our social responsibility to affect change, something which aligns much more with the ideal of democracy than our current tendency to stand back and complain about the government whilst simultaneously depending on it to fail to make changes that will benefit us.

Pins and needles

[SPOILER ALERT]

I watched an episode (4) of House, M.D.: Season Five today in which an adopted Chinese girl sets out in search of her birth parents, and ends up gravely ill.

In the end, it is discovered that her parents placed pins into her brain in an attempted murder, because China had a one-child policy, and the parents wanted a boy.

When her adoptive parents hear the diagnosis, they request that she not be told that her parents attempted to kill her because they didn't want her. They understand her to be emotionally fragile and fear that she may react badly, especially as she had history of alcoholism and smoking. However, the doctor explains that the pins pierce through specific areas of her brain, including her addiction centre (I'm guessing the VTA / some part of her mesolimbic system).

"She may not be as fragile as you think," the doctor says.

"We know our daughter," they respond.

He says, "It's not her fault, she's not who you think she is."

[/SPOILER ALERT]

How much of how we behave is really comprehensible to the people around us? It's so easy to look at someone who's a drug addict, or who's got problems stealing, or with violence, and to say, "I'm not like that. How can they go about ruining their life like that..." It's so easy to judge others, and delineate them as different from ourselves.

But do we really understand exactly what's going on in their lives, in their minds? How much of what they think and do is really of their own volition? If you were placed in that situation, with that brain chemistry, can you say with conviction that you would choose to not be a druggie?

In fact, when you stop and thinking about it, how much of what we think is in our conscious control? That girl had physical, metal pins in her head that affected her and caused her to behave differently than what is biologically considered to be normal. But we have pins too. Maybe they don't seem to be there in a literal sense, but our genes code for our neurocircuitry, and much of our behaviour is learnt and imprinted on us by our environments. Although it may be slippery slope to say that free will does not exist, perhaps it is a less evenly free playing field than we imagine it to be for the other person.

It seems strange to think it, but I think what Sara Crewe, a privileged heiress, says about Becky, a poor servant girl in the same boarding school, about sums it up:

"Why," she said, "we are just the same--I am only a little girl like you. It's just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!"

- A Little Princess, Chapter 5, Frances Hodgson Burnett

It is a scary thought, perhaps. Especially when we pause to consider that we are not so very different from the people we disdain or dislike, as much as we would like to believe it. In reality, there is perhaps little besides God's grace, or "accident", that separates one person's personality or fortune from another.

But ultimately, I think these thoughts point us in quite a refreshing direction in attempting to relate to other people: understanding, respect and love. Even of the less than loveable.

Appearances

We're told that appearances don't matter. We shouldn't be fussed about them - that's vanity.

The thing is, all we can see of other people is their appearance. Even when you say you know someone really well, all you can really say is that you've seen their various appearances over either a long period of time or in varied circumstances, such that it gives the semblance of knowing them well.

We don't, and we can't present anything less than an appearance, to well, anyone.

Except perhaps God.