A few weeks back Dr. Sexson spoke on an ancient ritual based around Seeing something, Saying something, and Doing something. And I have to say that this resonated with me. Those three aspects are what make life and what make life matter. It resonates and as Dr. Sexson mentions it echoes through all of Shakespeare and even beyond, much farther beyond I would say.
To begin we look at the senses; seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting. These are the five senses as everybody knows but what are they important for. They take in information and send signals to the brain for the brain to do whatever it wishes with that information. Ultimately this is the first part of the equation on human life. Seeing Something. Now I've applied all of the senses to this because often we see something but we also hear something and isn't it wonderful when you can rely on the less prevalent senses as well. But either way you take information into your body and store it in your brain in an imperfect way. This is why some of the more significant experiences that we may take in stick with us for a very long time. If it is memorable enough in the information relayed and triggered some sort of reaction from us than it will likely stick around for longer. Much of our education is based around this part of the triad. We take information in constantly. For us English majors we read and read and read and when there isn't much else to do we read some more. Information from our outside world is how we know to make connections and is inseparable in from our learning process.
The next of course is saying something. There are many ways say something. Speech we learn from our parents and community. They relay information to us and early on we interpret their meaning and by five years of age we know a myriad of words and phrases that we can use to relay our own information to others. Furthermore there is nonverbal communication which many of us take for granted because we listen more with our ears than we do with our eyes. Yes you can listen with your eyes if you pay close enough attention. Another form of communication of course is writing. We write to communicate to each other in the now and to communicate to future generations. And communication changes through the ages no matter what anybody does to try to keep it the same language and communication change. But what is important about this part of the triad is how we use it. Saying something came about from responding to the information that we take in (remember the first step?). Our brain takes in the information and prompts us to respond. I like to think primally about these things. How did our ancient ancestors discover communication. My best example is in music, because that is something that is still so strange to us. Most important to music is the beat. You hear this beat and it calls for you to join in or respond and we find ourselves tapping our foot to the beats of a song. Sometimes involuntarily but something called you from what your brain took in to respond to communicate that this information has been taken in and that you have interpreted it and now you want to add to it or keep it going in some way. There's something so extremely amazing about this to me. How many times do you sit there and read something that you love and in your mind you're saying, "YES!" but have nobody to communicate this to. You may want to say it directly to the author but many times s/he is dead. So what do you do? You recommend it to a friend so that they might read it and then you can speak with them about it. Bouncing ideas off each other about something you read the book becomes so much more at this point. It becomes something that two people can now better understand each other with if they didn't before. And what is even more interesting is that when you respond to something you've taken in you're likely to remember it better the next time you may have to relay the situation again because you've added to it or said something about it. In order for you to have added to it must have first taken the information in and then your brain had to have made an evaluation over it to find something relevant that could be meaningfully said through the interpretive devises that it is aware of. In this way when you respond to something or say something about something that you remember it better. This is very important for learning. I find this part of the step the most important to our abilities to function properly in this world of ours. Because most times our senses are always there and action means nothing if you cannot communicate why you were called to the action. There is so much more that could be expounded upon on this topic but it would take much more than one blog post to relay.
Now for the final part of the triad of ritual that drives our humanistic existence. ACTION. Many say that actions speak louder than words. If you were to take this literally you would have a hard time understanding, but of course the repeaters of this phrase mean that your reactions to the information that you take in is more important than what you say about it. In some way your action speaks to who you are and what you are willing to DO about a any given situation. I personally think that if you can't communicate why you DO something than how is somebody who has no prior knowledge on the subject supposed to know the reason for the action. But this is not to say that action is not important. And before I get into the importance of action, I feel I must set it up some. What is action? In the simplest form physical movement of your body. In more complex forms going somewhere to move or build with outside materials for a purpose. I mean just look at our modern society. Look at every thing that has been built. Physically, infrastructurally, and now even virtually. All of this came about by action. There is something to be said for physical movement and the relation that it has to our thought processes. I'm not really even sure how to address it, but let's look at an example. For some reason I'm thinking of Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars. But let's look at him he's large and yes he can communicate and take in information. But he rarely moves. How does he really know about his surroundings without actually interacting with it. He has everything brought to him for purposes that have no validity because he has no physical interactions with them. How would you know how to prepare food for yourself if you did not prepare it with your hands? How would you run away or towards something or someone if you did not use your legs often? How would you know when someone needs a hug if you had never hugged someone before? We must interact with our surroundings and the people in them in order to be able to interpret them in the fullest way. In this way Action and Doing something completes the triad of importance to our human existence.
There is much that I haven't said in this post but I know that this triad of ritual is what makes life meaningful to us as humans. But what is important most of all about this triad of meaning is in having the experiences within our lives be MEMORABLE. Meaning that as we go through life we should attempt to enjoy ourselves. How can we enjoy ourselves if we are continually having experiences within this triad of meaning that are not satisfying in some way. I challenge everybody to make their life meaningful and enjoyable with a constant balance of what you love and this triad of meaning.
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