And what of 2013? The first year since 1987 to have four different digits. Why that’s important, I don’t know – people try to find some divine meaning and significance in everything when, really, we should be building it ourselves. This year is going to be different, they say, before continuing to go about every task in exactly the same way. To that effect, New Year’s resolutions will most likely fail. But this year is going to be different. This is the year you should probably try doing something astronomical. What the heck. Move. Execute step one in your world domination plan. Create something unheard of. Just do it. And then this blog. Looks like it’s not going anywhere.
It is said that creativity is the basis of self-expression. Why are some people supposedly more creative than others, and why can’t others open themselves up enough to be able to express who they are? Creation is the birth of something, and something cannot come from nothing. When someone creates something: a painting, a poem, a photograph, the creativity comes from an idea, from a feeling, from emotion, or from a combination of ideas, feelings and emotions that are somehow ‘reborn’ from all our experiences and perspectives. Creativity is the desire to express ourselves. To formulate these expressions, we have to draw from our reservoir of experience, dreams, desires and experimentation and mix together what was, what is, and what could be… I don’t think you can learn it, it is rather something that evolves. Your perception of everything in your life fills up this reservoir.
Life is what it is. We live the life we choose, we are our own destiny. I know I may never escape this moodiness and loneliness, this hunger and restlessness in me. I still want to dream of places I like to visit. I want to stare at the sky and wonder what it’s doing.
Life is always in the way and life always has problems. There is no such thing as a perfect day or a peaceful day, there are just days. Every day new things excite, scare, oppress, confuse and change. Engage with them, fight, learn, grow, lose, win.
Life, as is the message at the heart of Feynman’s monologue, is to live the questions, to embrace the unfamiliar and to celebrate the beauty of the mysterious. It is a beautiful mantra on which to center the new year.
“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe…I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”







