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A place for Writing 12 students to read each other's writing, to critique, to suggest, to improve.
About Me
- Brad
- Former adult teacher who loves island beaches. Happy homebody and family man; once devoted dog owner, now without Tashi, my Tibetan Terrier. I prefer the absurdity of the imagination to the absurdity of imagining nothing.
3 comments:
I stopped in at Home Depot today and had an annoying experience there. While looking for some cleaner, a guy told me that he was responsible for the products and asked me if I had any questions for him.
"No," I answered, "Not really."
I'm not into aiding market research when out on an errand. But, funny enough, one of the other shoppers nearby, a middle-aged woman, was more than happy to engage him in conversation about floor cleaners.
So, who knows? Maybe I'm just oversensitive to the "pitch" or maybe it's just that shopping is something that I do out of duty and not pleasure.
Shopping observation.
Waiting in a grocery line does not often bring a positive reaction to your fellow man. There I was standing with a single article. Infront of me was a young women with a super-size family order,instead of being aggrivated, I reflected on days gone by, when I was working, shopping,and cooking for a family. At that moment she turned around showing me a rather worn and tired young face, "Do you just have the one article?, you can go ahead of me". I was truly grateful not only for the act but for the curtesy. I left the store that day with rather a nice feeling towards my fellow man.
Last week, my friends I went to an ice cream parlour. The choices laid before us were enormous, different varieties of flavours. Having eaten a mango flavoured ice cream at home (which I heartily enjoyed) before going to the said parlour, I thought I should order a different flavour, and I chose the maple syrup one. I didn’t enjoy it. It was too sweet for my taste. But was it really too sweet? Or perhaps, I was only dissatisfied with my choice because there were more than ten flavours right in front of me--mango, my favourite, included. Knowing that one of those flavours would be the best for taste lessened the satisfaction value of the maple syrup ice cream could’ve had. Of course, I could buy another different flavour, if not, try all of them. But that would be a waste of money. (If I ever had some.)
In the book The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, he talked about how important the choices we make in lives are. That the freedom we hope and fight for can actually hinder us from achieving satisfaction, and happiness. We equate liberty to choice, as if increasing the number of choices defines freedom.
I am not saying that the abundance of choice is wrong, but rather, that it also has negative and positive sides. For example, having too many options to chose from consumes our energy and time in unimportant things like spending a day in a shop looking for a perfect dress. Knowing that there would be thousands of designs makes us search more intently for the best one. At the end of the day, we try on the product, and still feel that it is not the perfect choice, because somewhere, someone is already wearing it. On the positive side, more options gives us higher possibility of making the right choice.
Paulo Coelho, author (The Alchemist), said: “Freedom is not the absence of commitment, but the ability to chose--and, commit ourselves--what is the best for us.” It is not about the quantity of choices. It is about making the right choice. I think, to escape or to overcome this dilemma is to know what we really want and to pursue it. Be it in choosing what to have for dinner, what cell phone plan to sign, or car to buy up to who to chose as a husband or wife, we should think carefully and know what we really want, and commit ourselves to it. Only by that, we’d be able to achieve happiness in the choices we make. (By the way, I ended up trying three more flavours of ice cream!)
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