Light and Darkness...
A couple of thoughts this evening.
I think people in general have a great sense of Justice... Look at some of the key TV shows - medical drama's where more often than not, people get better, miracle cures on ER and House, a bad lawyers learning moral lessons and doing the right thing on Boston Legal and Shark, People banding together to support each other in Lost, Police catching the bad guys on CSI, NCIS and Sleeper cell, Keifer Sutherland saving the world in 24, I could go on, But you get the idea, and no i don't watch all those shows... just some of them.
So my original thought was why is it that all of these shows focus a lot on the bad side of humanity... but then I realised that though that is part of the allure that makes shows like that watchable (entertaining), the reason people watch again and again is because at the end of the episodes, the right things happen (most of the time) and this satisifies our sense of justice. Not many people want the bad guy to get away with it, or the sick man to die. Interesting.
So then I was thinking about the metaphor of light and darkness... light presumably being metaphorical for all things good, and there are emotions that go with that there too - happiness, peace, love, a lightness, joy even. Darkness comes to mean all that is bad etc with associated emotions of despair, fear, hatred, and confusion.
And through my mind came a couple of things, one a story i remember a guy telling once. He opened his closet to get something out and stopped dead in his tracks. open door, close door, open door, close door, etc etc. What he noticed was that darkness never came out and overtook the light, the light always overtook the darkness. This may sound simplistic, or even trivial, but applied to that metaphor it becomes more striking.
Interestingly also for physics geeks, darkness is not really anything at all, simply an absence of light, one could apply such logic also to the metaphor of earlier...
So my real thought, perhaps vaguely original, was on wandering up the stairs to bed the other night... it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps we, perhaps I, have a unhealthy obsession with light. (I turned out the light) And i realised, that when the lights aren't on it's only initially that I fail to see, then my eyes adjust. That clever creator gave us rods as well as cones, (bits in your eyes that process light) so we can see even with the tiniest fraction of light... And sometimes when the lights go out we see things we havent before, perhaps it's things within ourselves, perhaps its things (literal things) that stand out all the more when there isn't light flooding them and bombarding our senses with a million and one images. Darkness is not necessarily to be feared but perhaps can sometimes be embraced and experienced for what it is, and what it shows us.
Ah if only I could do justice to all the thoughts that pass between my ears!
I think people in general have a great sense of Justice... Look at some of the key TV shows - medical drama's where more often than not, people get better, miracle cures on ER and House, a bad lawyers learning moral lessons and doing the right thing on Boston Legal and Shark, People banding together to support each other in Lost, Police catching the bad guys on CSI, NCIS and Sleeper cell, Keifer Sutherland saving the world in 24, I could go on, But you get the idea, and no i don't watch all those shows... just some of them.
So my original thought was why is it that all of these shows focus a lot on the bad side of humanity... but then I realised that though that is part of the allure that makes shows like that watchable (entertaining), the reason people watch again and again is because at the end of the episodes, the right things happen (most of the time) and this satisifies our sense of justice. Not many people want the bad guy to get away with it, or the sick man to die. Interesting.
So then I was thinking about the metaphor of light and darkness... light presumably being metaphorical for all things good, and there are emotions that go with that there too - happiness, peace, love, a lightness, joy even. Darkness comes to mean all that is bad etc with associated emotions of despair, fear, hatred, and confusion.
And through my mind came a couple of things, one a story i remember a guy telling once. He opened his closet to get something out and stopped dead in his tracks. open door, close door, open door, close door, etc etc. What he noticed was that darkness never came out and overtook the light, the light always overtook the darkness. This may sound simplistic, or even trivial, but applied to that metaphor it becomes more striking.
Interestingly also for physics geeks, darkness is not really anything at all, simply an absence of light, one could apply such logic also to the metaphor of earlier...
So my real thought, perhaps vaguely original, was on wandering up the stairs to bed the other night... it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps we, perhaps I, have a unhealthy obsession with light. (I turned out the light) And i realised, that when the lights aren't on it's only initially that I fail to see, then my eyes adjust. That clever creator gave us rods as well as cones, (bits in your eyes that process light) so we can see even with the tiniest fraction of light... And sometimes when the lights go out we see things we havent before, perhaps it's things within ourselves, perhaps its things (literal things) that stand out all the more when there isn't light flooding them and bombarding our senses with a million and one images. Darkness is not necessarily to be feared but perhaps can sometimes be embraced and experienced for what it is, and what it shows us.
Ah if only I could do justice to all the thoughts that pass between my ears!
posted by Ryan and Mez at
10:42 PM
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