So I LOVE TED. I have a few videos that I watch over and over as coping strategies for when my brain needs help. I also have a lot of journals. And I almost started a new one today just to write down a few things about this TED talk and I said to myself, "THIS IS GETTING OUT OF HAND! YOU CANNOT HAVE A TED JOURNAL." So I went to the blog instead. But I still might start a TED journal.
The talk called Who am I? does not have anything to do with the numbers 24601 or Jean Val Jean. It is a great, short talk about one of the ways we discover who we are. He talks about imitation. Children are programmed to imitate, it is how they learn to become. All of Hetain Patel's artwork deals with the concept of identity. His discovery is that identity is "an ever-shifting game of imitation." As children, who did we imitate? As students, workers, adults? As humans, who do we imitate and whose identity did we want from the beginning?
He also uses a word that is very significant in my life: failure. To me, sometimes failure is like this giant rock that is constantly with me, magnetically engineered to stay by me. It is heavy and I am scared of it. I have tried throwing it away from me, leaving it behind, climbing over it, hiding under it, dragging it, kicking it, ignoring it, romanticizing it, philosophizing it, embracing it . . . The reality is that failure is a fact of life. And I really love life. I liked this video because he talks about failure in a way that I have never considered. Sometimes, or always, the human conditions that seem to weaken us the most are the ones that lead us to the discovery of who we truly are. And when we know who we are, I believe we can overcome anything.
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