Friday, March 2, 2012

Over, Under, and Elsewhere

An essay by Rommel Martinez


2012-03-02

Our cunning ability for oversight is deridingly high. Whether it may be solving a problem or just trying to be creative. Our impulse to over-engineer is unusually prevalent if our initial expectations are not met. We drag our consciousness to lengths almost unfathomable because we think that if we pour in a lot of thought, the outcome is positively and proportionately high according to our convictions. We complain about our lack of tools. We complain about our lack of resources. Yet, we are astonished and brought to shocking disbelief when someone does it with far less than what our hands have. We disenchant the probability that what we are precisely looking for, is right on our ear. Our ability to dismiss ideal options hulking right in front of us, is appalling. Why do we need to dig an underground tunnel to get in, when all that is needed is to knock?

It is very disturbing that we unjustifiably position ourselves to unfailingly accept words just because we have been told to assimilate them. We believe that they are truths without making the slightest advance towards ensuring that what you just heard is infallible. It is also disconcerting that for many, if not most, that they'd rather take what they have been told, as is, rather than be criticized for raising their hand to ask what could possibly be dubious claims. When we say yes, without giving the slightest amount of thought, we have effectively enveloped ourselves with a cloud-like cushion, that, while it makes everything immediately adjacent from your skin heavenly, we neglect to pursue the intellectual safety and we give ourselves self-approved parachutes. 
On a higher note, I also find that a lot of people radically position themselves to absolute positions. We are very fond of inventing and assigning labels among ourselves. We think that by moving ourselves to thought-bunkers, we build assumptions that because of the security that our bunker provides, we have prevailed. From our DNA that provides us with the information that contains the code of what makes us tick, we turn to our brains to store yet more information. These various pieces of information and high in breadth, that our humble DNA can no longer even begin to contain. But alas, what we have in our individual brains is still not enough to house our ever-growing house of knowledge. We needed to find a way to record them outside our bodies, stored somewhere where data retrieval is one of its most critical operations -- we wrote and created records. We began by writing on stones, walls, and anything that would hopefully persist to contain what it must, across generations of readers. We have built colossal libraries, with gargantuan collections of books. With it, we have stored an immense amount of records, far beyond what all the brains of all humans can contain. Then, the libraries became computer databases. We took yet another step in building tower houses of what our ancestors knew, and what we know today. But both by intrigue and disturbance, we see that not even our most advanced technology is able to carefully record, with predictability, our coordinates in space in time, for the past, present, and future. We are in a time wherein we can, with high certainty, tell whether a drinking glass has something in it or not. 

Some of us persist in delusions that claim to know what they have never ventured, or at the least, observed. It is very disheartening that instead of taking a step back and gaze at the sky for a moment, people instead immerse themselves in wonderland. This very intoxicating habit, harms not an individual, but the whole mankind. When someone tells you that answers to his questions can only be exclusively be answered always by a yes or no, leave him and that he no longer deserve to have your attention again. If you do not know the answer, you should say that you do not know the answer, instead of doing trapeze jumps without anyone to catch your hands.

Oftentimes, we overlook that all the tools that we need are right with us.

Original link: http://rmm.meta.ph/essays/over-under.html

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