When life is a metaphor
An appreciation for real-life poetry
As I’m falling asleep (apparently, this state is called hypnagogia), I begin to have many evanescent thoughts. I remember some aspects of the characters of these thoughts, so here are some made-up examples:
Darn I need to confront my pillow about how it’s a bit too needy lately…
If I keep this backstroke up, maybe the plants will want to listen to me…
How brilliant it is that packages are shaped like tofu so that they stack…
I gotta get to the atrium now before I miss the secret to true happiness…
I love the low pitch of this graph’s edges but I don’t want them to snap…
The smell of yellow-blue might become critical to this nation’s survival…
I should paint my ears before they evaporate; otherwise I’ll forget them…
Breaking into a video explaining NNs to save them from objectification…
When this happens, the lines between dream and reality are completely blurred. Everything seems to be alive and emotional, like the occasional empathy one might feel for inanimate objects but on steroids and for everything: person, object, idea, place, rule. Real objects seem to me to be endlessly symbolic, and abstract concepts seem to me to me to be real objects, fully embodied. I make the strangest connections between completely disparate ideas that I confuse for each other — it feels like creativity to the max and inhibition to the min.
Most interestingly, when I’m beginning to lose consciousness, sometimes in a jolt, I realize that my thoughts just now were utterly nonsensical and incoherent, and yet, my reaction isn’t entirely “wow that was stupid”, for alongside that, I feel like I have just divined what it feels like to be brilliant. To make connections no one else would, to understand the souls of everyday objects, to be able to make sense of the world because nothing is incoherent.
This year was my first year as a junior counselor at SPARC after being a student for the past two years (for my purposes here, I’ll not count 2021, which was a virtual camp during COVID-19).
My first time IRL, the reason I wanted to go to SPARC in the first place was that I heard about stories like talking to strangers and practicing social skills, and I was like, “wow, I want to be made to try that sort of scary stuff”. And one of the biggest things I got out was indeed learning to step out of my comfort zone, more broadly to explore in general. SPARC, to me, then in part became Comfort Zone Expansion Camp. There’d be instructors with ideas for classes that they’d run that pushed what I felt possible. There’d be campers I wouldn’t normally talk to that I could try to. Being in such an environment felt especially important to me, and so I wanted to try to do things I wouldn’t normally do. Walking around blindfolded! Talking to random professors on campus! I didn’t even have the courage to make the former one happen; a kind friend stepped up to propose the event. The act of running events to push my comfort zone was itself a little bit out of my comfort zone, and from eventually learning to do so, I grew by miles.
I wanted to return to SPARC because it had taught me so much — I wrote in my returner application that I wanted to “witness the awesomeness of the SPARC staff again, learn from it, and perhaps imitate it”. And then, on Day 1 of next year’s SPARC, I was immediately struck by a class *highlighting* what one can learn from witnessing an educational environment. It, among other things, taught us to think critically about education, communication, and messaging, asking us to reflect on what we subtly learn both from conscious inferences we make and from subconscious cues we pick up on. That SPARC for me largely became Education Camp, where I constantly noticed when I was learning, what I was learning, how I was learning. The act of going to classes grew into an experience entirely revolving around learning, for there would be the content itself, and there would be what I could learn from my experience of how it was taught, and, well, essentially, there was so much to pay attention to all the time. It was, in fact, precisely because I applied this to the very class that taught it, noticing peculiarities in the fact that that class was taught and in in way it was taught, drawing inferences from that the nature of that experience, that I ended up beginning to see this as one of the most important classes I had ever taken.
As I came to care fundamentally about the values that SPARC can provide its participants, I wanted to become a JC at SPARC so that I could learn how SPARC acts on these values and participate in that myself. And this year’s SPARC was the strangest of all for me because it was, for the first time, not as transformative-seeming. Perhaps this is some mix of being used to SPARC and its core curriculum, being able to afford greater freedom in non-SPARC contexts now that I’m in college, and there not being one massive life improvement it seemed to offer. But that’s not to say SPARC wasn’t a valuable experience, just not a strange-seeming one. I was told that being a JC is like being a student who also does ops, and that’s exactly how it felt. I expected to have meaningful conversations with people, and that’s exactly what I did. I expected to try my hand at helping and even teaching others, and that’s exactly what happened. Maybe one way to put it is that I finally actually went to a camp that felt like a camp where I was applying rationality — by taking the time to think about, talk through, and practice dealing with subject matters important to me (some including experimentation, purpose, fluidity, tenderness, social environments), often through conversation, I came up with many actually important ideas that translated into real-world, concrete actions I wanted to take. It’s not necessarily that I had surprising concepts to learn; maybe it’s more so that this year, SPARC has begun to translate into putting thoughts into action.
There is, however, a surprising part to all this. I notice that after I left SPARC, I am suddenly constantly thinking about how to pursue the kind of world I’d love to live in. This year is the one I’ve walked out of with the most vision for what could be and, inspired by many campers, the most ambition for making it happen. I notice that I find myself endlessly hopeful, having, e.g., written thousands of words to myself over the past few weeks about my ambitions, suddenly sorting through tons of ideas. It’s a form of magic that I find so strange because, this time, I did not viscerally feel myself learning. I did not find myself gaining transformative knowledge about the world. The act of action on already existing care did not feel like a mind-blowing experience. But it’s objectively true that I *have* transformed, for even a month ago, I would not have expected to care so much about certain aspects of my life, or at least not have expected to do anything about it. But I have discovered that it was within me all along, that I care about what I *care* about.
Trying to step out of my comfort zone requiring me to step out of my comfort zone. Learning from the experience of learning to examine what I learn from learning experiences. Acting on caring about acting on what I care about. The actual situation in which I was learning these subjects was itself a metaphor for those very subjects. I’m not quite sure what I make of this pattern. It’s absurd, and it’s freaky, and perhaps what I’m really trying to say is that it’s poetic. It feels like my mind somehow conflating abstract concepts with real situations; it feels like the blurring of the line between dream and reality.
I have thus come to the realization that I love it when pedagogical experiences are autological. I admire the brilliance of the teacher who talks about public speaking skills while demonstrating those very public speaking skills, or the story whose character talks about prejudice in a way that reveals their own, or the 1-on-1 I had the night before I was going to teach my first SPARC class where, among other things, David taught me about inspiring students in a way that ended up inspiring me. In a way, it feels like there must be some line being blurred or some fourth wall being broken, fiction that would only happen in hypnogogia or xkcd.
One of the ambitions I leave SPARC with is one that I will bring into my sophomore year of college. I want to create a social group with the explicit goal of finding people who get curious easily, who enjoy thinking about the unfamiliar, who are inventive, and who will treat each other’s ideas with respect. I love the sorts of social interactions where people build off of each other’s spirits, forming and trying ideas in a space where unconventional does not immediately equate to frivolous. To make this happen, I plan to reach out to friends who embody these traits, share my ideas with them, hear what they have to say, hope that they will help me bring this vision to life. The amusing part is that because of the very fact that I will especially be seeking out people who love to build off of others’ ideas, I expect that many such friends and future friends might end up sharing my excitement. Those who see beauty worth taking seriously in many places who might find beauty worth taking seriously in this.
It makes me hopeful, thinking so. I have found a vision for which I genuinely care.
create a social group with the explicit goal » i've never seen this happen successfully irl. feels too goal-directed, as opposed to something like "creating a social group where we <do thing>"
"I have found a vision for which I genuinely care." <3