On the movie “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”
There are moments in our lives when everything starts to change at one point or another. The course of life depends on various things, but when one decides to change it no one will have the power to stop it.
Great moments of history weren’t in wars or victories after them. The greatest moments are the ones that a society -or community- gets together to define what they believe in and how the future of their society they want it to be. There are all mights and mays, but when we choose a route, there is no way back. There is no quitting. In my own small way, it happened to me. I made the choices, or they made me. Sometimes, we are not the ones who choose everything. This is the weird thing about life and, actually, the one that makes it interesting. Coincidences at the moment may seem harmless or not influential, but when they get all together, they can ruin or build things that may remain long after.
In the long run, lots of things can change a person, but the only thing that can change one to another is connection. Absorbing social support by meeting the people you trust and are close to is the thing that can change a person.
“The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” is the book and the movie that reading or watching might do you some good. As Annie Borrows has written: “We clung to books and to our friends; they reminded us that we had another part to us.”
That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive – all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.
It was amazing to me then, and still is, that so many people who wander into bookshops don’t really know what they’re after–they only want to look around and hope to see a book that will strike their fancy. And then, being bright enough not to trust the publisher’s blurb, they will ask the book clerk the three questions: (1) What is it about? (2) Have you read it? (3) Was it any good?
Humour is the best way to make the unbearable bearable.
Words are the source of misunderstandings
I was thinking about how language can be a barrier and how it can bring people together in different ways. A sentence appeared in my mind, so I searched for it on Google: “Words are the source of misunderstandings.” The sentence was a quote from the Little Prince novel, chapter 21.
Tim Gingrich has beautifully put into words what I wanted to say:
“Those of us who work in a world of words know it’s true. The more we talk, the less we say. The more words we use, the less any of it means. I think we get caught up in words, because it’s easier to communicate thoughts than confront feelings. Feelings are thoughts without words.”
It’s been a wonder to me why unkind words from loved ones have the potential to hurt you so much that it shows up as serious physical pain. It turns out brain receptors for physical and emotional pain are the same.
With all these interpretations, it occurred to me that the old English saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” didn’t seem to be true: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” As we all know, words can hurt or wound as much as a knife can make us feel the same pain.
You can read or watch more in these links:
When Words Are Weapons: 10 Responses Everyone Should Avoid
Why Words Can Hurt at Least as Much as Sticks and Stones
The Source of Misunderstandings: Language. Language as a Barrier in “The Little Prince”
“Language is our Power. Words can be Weapons.” – Muireann Byrne
When you don’t name things any longer, you start seeing them
A while ago, I found an inspirational audio file by Alan Watts named “The Unspeakable World.” At this moment, I think you need to listen to it, so I have brought you the text to read.
But you know, if you talk all the time, you will never hear what anybody else has to say, and therefore, all you’ll have to talk about is your own conversation. The same is true for people who think all the time. That means, when I use the word ‘think,’ talking to yourself, subvocal conversation, the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull. Now, if you do that all the time, you’ll find that you’ve nothing to think about except thinking, and just as you have to stop talking to hear what I have to say, you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about. And the moment you stop thinking, you come into immediate contact with what Korzybski called, so delightfully, ‘the unspeakable world.
The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying ‘that’s a shadow, that’s red, that’s brown, that’s somebody’s foot.’ When you don’t name things anymore, you start seeing them. Because say when a person says ‘I see a leaf,’ immediately, one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing outlined in black and filled in with flat green. No leaf looks like that. No leaves — leaves are not green. That’s why Lao-Tzu said ‘the five colors make a man blind, the five tones make a man deaf,’ because if you can only see five colors, you’re blind, and if you can only hear five tones in music, you’re deaf. You see, if you force sound into five tones, you force color into five colors, you’re blind and deaf. The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it.
I am not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way as being schoolteacherish, and saying ‘if you were NICE people, that’s what you would do.’ For heaven’s sake, don’t be nice people. But the thing is, that unless you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of liberation will blow the world to pieces. It’s too strong a current for the wire.
You can open this link to listen to the original file :
‘The Unspeakable World’-Alan Watts(Music By Adi Goldstein)
