An ordinary farm somewhere in southern Alabama, with its usual attributes, had chickens, cattle and horses! Here John at the age of five tended to the bird flocks, roosters and hens. Discovering they make a wonderful audience, he preached to his flapping friends the good news. They intently listened to his warm tiny voice.
This warm tiny voice grew up to give a voice to many people as the Civil Right Legend John Lewis (February 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020), fighting for civil rights in America.
I write to make some meaning into our ordinary lives which has such a low success rate. I hope you will find Delights in your Ordinary!
While, on the other side of the globe, somewhere in Japan, Takishima Mika (Born: January 15, 1931) once got a dig from her husband that she is chunky and flabby. Taking it as a fierce challenge to prove her husband wrong she enrolled in the gym.
She was 65 then.
Today she is 93, and is now known to be the oldest fitness trainer the world has!
Our actions entrench the power of the light on this planet. Every positive thought we pass between us makes room for more light. And if we do more than think, then our actions clear the path for even more light.
John Lewis. Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change
If we choose to see; see with the original set of eyes; the eyes of our heart. We will find opportunities to make small amendments to let the light enter. You know it is just like opening that corner window or drawing away those thick curtains to let the light inside the room.
I believe we all have those sets of eyes that curiously skim for light. Yet, It is very less that we open them. Mostly we just open our eye sockets, not our real eyes.
The reverence of life:
And how everything can make its own unique liveliness. Look at the world around and you will find many stories to simply say, "Aha! Life is good.”
No one knows when flowers blossomed up on the earth but the evolutionary theory says they appeared very quickly as compared to other vegetation. Darwin could never comprehend how flowers could emerge so suddenly and take over so completely hence, he called it an “abominable mystery.”
This is exactly the mystery of light. You will never know when the light will fill in. You only have to make space for it.
Hold onto the difficult ground:
The excellence does not erupt from cosy places. It emerges from the tough and demanding junctures of life, like the humble preaching on the poor farm and harsh taunts around! If you learn to hold on to these difficult grounds and search from there then you can zealously preach to the chicken, fight for civil rights and lift weights as much as easily at the age of 65. Heroic enthusiasm erupts from parched ground!
Isn’t this world a crazy aplomb place we have? We ought to let the world be as bright as we can have.
“The habitual tendency when things get tough is that we protect ourselves, we get hard, we get rigid. But...that’s the time to soften and see how we might play or dance with the situation.”– Jeff Bridges
To joyscroll: Olaf Breuning is an artist and a photographer who finds faces in food and you sure will have a stretched smile seeing how much we connect with human-ness anywhere we can witness it. :)
Olaf on his profile, says, “i guess i do all things right, right? but still....the instagram algorithm does not like me! why???” Hilarious.
To read: Read more about Takishima Mika the 93-year-old fitness instructor and how she still maintains the exuberance of her age-old days.
To watch: Made to Measure, a documentary that runs a social experiment of creating a doppelganger of a person based on her digital footprints. In this given experiment they succeeded to recreate a person just by scrolling through her Google search data. AI is a machine learning technology that is constantly learning by the inputs we are giving through our online searches. And AI based on your past (digital fingerprints) now predicts your future.
Even if you don’t have time to watch it right away, I would recommend you save it for the future to watch. Almost an hour documentary, is a big eye-opener to how accurately our personalities are predicted by AI and merged with who we really are. This has been like a wake-up call for me.
In a way, it makes the digital future looks and feels scathingly scary.
Quoting some words from this documentary, “These systems (AI) tends to project the past into the future. But what if I want to change? Who is the author of my identity and my sense of self?” and “It’s like reality has blended with a story. Like my past feels like a script.”
Create joy: On a positive note, scientists are realising that our emotions aren’t hard-wired. They are created by our brains in response to :
what life events we are experiencing and
what we’ve felt in the past that had similar patterns.
Thus now it is also understood that small doses of daily ordinary delight can shift our focus away from our worries and give more opportunity for joy to arise. The NPR joy generator “has gathered some ideas to help you tap into positive emotions, online and offline.” (NPR = National Public Radio)
Hence, don’t let anyone predict you by your past. Not even AI or Chat GPT. You can make better joyful choices and make a better future.
To end:
“Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake, up to my neck in that most precious element of all,
I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather floating on the tension of the water
at the very instant when a dragonfly, like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,
hovered over it, then lit, and rested. That’s all.
I mention this in the same way that I fold the corner of a page
in certain library books, so that the next reader will know
where to look for the good parts.”
- Field Guide by Tony Hoagland
May you have a light-shining weekend and many places to look for the good parts.
Very well written and I understand the meaning of writing about AI but technicaly ML is a subset of AI. :)