Things That I Know, In No Particular Order
1. When baby swallows sit in their nests up on the beams of the arcades in front of shops, waiting for their parents to bring them their mosquito dinner, they look like dissatisfied old men chewing their dentures.
2. When children push back against you, after you tell them to write the story about the dragon and the princess and the newspapers writing lies about their relationship, and procrastinate for the entire two hour and twenty minute class and only write five lines, it’s not personal. Your job as the teacher is to both create occasion for, and then witness, their struggle with themselves.
3. Ursula K. LeGuin is an inspiring writer, because she speaks of an aspect of human existence that very few writers explore. And also because her women are human beings.
4. Sometimes you read a book in your 20s and it means nothing, so much so that you forget all about it, and then you read it in your 40s and you wonder to yourself, saying, “How are all books not like this book? This book is perfect in every way,” and then promptly remember that you’ve read it before, and moreover that art changes with the perceptions and experience of the viewer, and there is a time and a place for everything.
5. What you read, what you experience, what you surround yourself with all influence you, and few people want to acknowledge this, because it’s true, but also because then they’d have to change what they don’t like about themselves.
6. When you point out painful, or horrible, or otherwise unspeakable things, the people around you will appear not to see it, or appear to not understand what you’re talking about, and it’s not because they don’t, but because they do, and they don’t know what to do with the knowledge. Or because they do and they don’t know what to do with the anger that knowledge ignites inside them.
7. People hate hearing true things when they are not ready for them. They love hearing true things only if they’re funny, and if they don’t have any obligation to act in any way on what they know afterwards.
8. A group of people was tasked with building the largest and longest bridge in the world, and they created many innovative machines to help them build it. One day their innovative machine broke. They had to find a solution or a new part within 6 hours, and it was impossible to manufacture this new part and transport it within 6 hours. It seemed the whole project would collapse, but the person in charge told everyone to make an inventory of everything they had. Nobody understood the point, but they had discipline, so they did. And through this inventory they realised they had an exact duplicate of the machine, which would only be needed 72 hours later, and 72 hours was enough time to make and transport the part for that machine, so they quickly replaced the part and the project was saved. From this story I now know that when you don’t know what else to do, make an inventory of what you have, because therein lies the solution.
9. The world is in trouble.
10. We have the solution(s) all around us, but we need to take inventory.