A sequel would only be made if the first movie was considered successful and popular, and a movie is only very successful and popular if it has good characters.
Showing posts with label Change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Change. Show all posts
Good Characters Make Bad Sequels
A sequel would only be made if the first movie was considered successful and popular, and a movie is only very successful and popular if it has good characters.
The Fields So Far
The old saying that 'practice makes perfect' seems to become increasingly self-evident as you get older. I know that many adults say that they wish they had been more devoted to some of the hobbies they enjoyed when they were younger, because they know that they would like to be enjoying the fruits of their persistence now.
I set myself a target to write something on this blog three times each month because I thought it would be challenging enough to push me, but low enough that I wouldn't burn out or get frustrated. So far, it seems like that was a good estimate.
A Thought About Funerals
A typical service in a Christian church
has two main parts of the program: A time of musical worship, and a
time for a sermon to be preached. Worship followed by learning,
adoration leading to instruction.
This order enables the congregation to
first focus on God and their relationship with Him. The sermon that
follows can then be engaged with in a good frame of mind, in a more
accurate sense of context. Worship enables me to momentarily break
the habit of focusing on myself, of placing myself at the centre of
the universe, and instead focus on God, placing Him in the centre of
everything. When biblical teaching is received, we should first apply
it to our relationship or understanding of God, and only to mankind
after this. Worship could be said in this way to not only provide an
accurate context for any sermon, but for any part of our daily lives.
If a typical church service consists of
worship and then practical application, then I propose that funeral
services are the reverse of this.
Stories, Maths, Politics and Board Games
Stories and numbers seem intertwined in
a confusing way. That one should come
from another seems odd, but they do have some things in common. Stories involve change, and our earliest lessons in maths
teach us how to change numbers. Politicians, game designers, and many other workers in the world require some skill at
translation from one to the other, yet I wouldn't know where any of
us learned how to do this.
Greedy Optimism
Many people who would describe themselves as "not religious" appear to have an optimistic view that the world generally turns out OK. This view has possibly been influenced by seeing too many movies or reading too many books with shiny happy endings, but the optimism isn't founded on anything more solid that a vague idea that things just turn out that way.
Some of the most visible examples of this for me have been brief updates that people write online. I see people I know writing that they are currently going through a bad time, but that there is hope. Not hope in anything in particular. Just hope! These individuals sometimes quote the kind of happy mantras you might find in a birthday card or on a car bumper sticker, as if these small and cheap products are enough evidence to conclude that life can, and should, be nice all of the time. Strangely, the people who share these ideas about how nice life should always be are among the most frequent to complain that thing's are going badly.
All of this self-enforced happiness about life has recently reminded me of something else in the world- Economics. The way that the world has currently decided Economics works seems to echo some of this same unfounded optimism that I frequently see.
Maturity and Dependance
Say the world understands 2 states: Immature and Mature. The aim (in most cultures, I wonder about ours at the moment) is to move from Immature, which we are born into, to Mature. Our aim is to grow mentally and emotionally, just as we naturally grow physically.
A lot of the world seems to assume that these 2 labels are parallel to 2 others that we naturally go through- Dependant, and Independant. This view says that being Dependant is child-like, inferior, and Immature. But when I become Independant, I am adult, superior, and Mature.
It's easy to see where this view comes from. From birth, we Depend on adults to survive. But as we grow older, these caring adults encourage us to become more and more Independant. That, at least, is the word commonly used, but I don't think this is the best target to aim for. Maybe parents encourage Independance so much because a part of them is impatient for their loved ones to fly from the nest! "You need to learn to be Independant" (for 'be Independant' read 'Go Away'.)
All Change
One stereotype of older people is that they complain that "Things aren't what they Used to be." By Things they can mean anything in the world as they know it, and what they Used to be is obviously different to what they Are Now. So change has ocurred.
Change seems to be a sore point for many people, not just those in their old age. It may not be a stereotype for a teenager to complain that their school timetable has changed when they didn't expect it to, or that facebook's new layout isn't as good as the last one, but I have definately heard both of these, and far more trivial causes for upset.
Looking at most people in western civilisation (I cannot speak for any other), the general plan in life seems to be to end with an amount of comfort and security that has been accumulated, and then for life to simply stay that way. When we have done our time in the areas of hard work, fighting to survive, and then scrimping to save, we think that the world deserves to let us take it easy until life ends.
Death and/or Gloom
Many people are scared of death. But doesn't that seem odd?
Death: the 'ultimate statistic', the one thing that every living thing can be certain will occur to it, must surely be analysed as the most natural thing that can happen to us, since it happens with so much more certainty than anything else in life.
But for some reason, something that we could call natural, feels quite unnatural. Most people put great effort into avoiding it for as long as possible. It is currently still considered a taboo subject in England.
Does this unnatural feeling perhaps point towards a built-in part of ourselves that knows it was never meant to die?
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