That anyways is what I have learned

What I have learned, to tell you what I have learned is a lie in any way that I can say it. In trying to tell you what I have learned no matter how much I try to bring it back to this course I just end up talking about myself. You could say that makes me a selfish person, and as an individualistic American college student pursuing my education it is hard to argue against that. But I wish to ignore selfishness, because when you truly understand one individual you can then apply that knowledge to all individuals. The famous phrase “know thyself” written on the walls of Delphi have always resonated strongly with me. It is within the individual that we begin to write ourselves into the story that falls onto our ears from Sexson. Within the individual, relatability takes root and vestiges of empathy grow stronger. The more stories we hear, the more we imagine, the more we imagine the more complicated we become. Through this complexity of our private libraries of stories, of individuals, of refractions of what we could have been, we find the means to make ourselves. When I think about people, I think about stories, I think about how if I was born under different circumstances I could have been you and you me. I think about how the differences in our lives are really very trivial compared to the one transcendent identity that we all possess thanks to our individual stories of being a me. The loops that we can see in our lives of separation, initiation and return are similar stories told differently based on minute details that we perceive as negligible. But ignoring the differences in stories and writing them off as trivial is a dangerous procedure. It is so frighteningly dangerous and yet we suspect nothing. The difference between most humans DNA is said to be negligible, since we have a 99 percent DNA similarity to chimpanzees. Yet all the time scientists are discovering that the DNA that they have termed junk is actually the key to understanding important things such as a person's susceptibility to disease. Humans naturally try to arrange things in ordered patterns, it is our successful strategy for survival. But in searching for patterns in stories we end up looking for confirmation that everything is the same rather than appreciating individual difference. What we may view as “junk DNA” or “negligible differences” may just be the constituents of a higher degree of order that we cannot yet understand. And when we look at a story and categorize it according to everything else that we have learned or been told we may fail to see that the loop of separation and return is not a loop at all, but an upward spiral. Each time someone crawls, walks, and runs they hear words and stories and combine and compile them in an entirely informational and original fashion. They also have the benefit of living after all of their ancestors with many of their mistakes and successes in mind. Not everything that is dropped is picked up, but each time a story spirals through a lifetime it gains momentum in the things that were most important and relevant to the storyteller and former storyteller. When we hear tales of Gods and Goddesses we are actually hearing from the imaginations of past individuals not so different from ourselves. These imaginations of individuals reflect further the imaginations of individuals that influenced them. And furthermore we are not clearly seeing just what these people imagined, but instead the idyllic of what they wanted to represent people as. Within stories we find the individuals approximation of what they want people to be like, but how can these people accurately depict individuals when every individual is plagued with being unable to truly see themselves except through others eyes. Between what we hear about ourselves and what we see of others we create our own identities. This identity is a disjointed contraption which is actually just a very long series of other peoples stories haphazardly reflected across time and circumstance. Yet within all of this utter madness and chaos of who we are, and where we came from we find our true selves. From all of the information we collect from stories we calculate the best person we can be, we calculate the worst person we can be, and then we produce an aggregate based on the needs of the time. This may seem simplistic, but it gives us each a clear cut path to better ourselves with each new story heard. Every time we hear of a decision the participant of the story makes, we get to think, I would never do that, or I want to be the kind of person that would do that. It may seem like a small decision, but each time we decide how to define ourselves in response to the information we have achieved a great victory. It is as it has been said many times this semester, these are not things that I have learned, they are merely things that I have been reminded of in discussing mythology. If I were to speak of my tale as truly as I could you would come to understand me and you better. But in the process I would be lying based on my own perception of what happened and we would all be here a very long time. So I will only say this: It is not the world, it is not people, it is not nature, it is not animals that keep us alive and moving every day, it is our own stories. We are saturated with our own story in the high level of meaning that we find from every event that happens to us. When we stub our toe, or throw a piece of paper across the room into a garbage can, no one will ever find it as meaningful as we do. But it is through this process of individuals finding things that apply to them the most interesting that together we can search for things that interest everyone. In comparing our “junk” we can find ways to transcend our boredom and overcome seemingly similar circular cycles. For example, one of the most useful gems of junk that I have taken from this class is Sexson's infinite appreciation for the meaning in words. If you can’t have fun with words, then why did you work so hard to learn language. That is what I have appreciated so much about this class, unlike most others, people seem to care not only about the words that they say, but the words that everyone has said. Together we have appreciated the value that a story gives us in the dos and do nots implicit in the plot lines. I could say much more about all the things that I have learned in listening to your stories, but I feel that the learning is better expressed in the amount of change created in the individual from the influence of others stories. The individual identity reflects the social identity, and in the process the information changes in response to all the differences in each person, giving us an infinitely changing blob of cool and awesome ideas. That anyway is what I have remembered to learn so far.