If a tree falls in a forest...
Question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it….
We said goodbye and I returned to Rainbow house for supper. But on the way home I was left wondering – what is she? Is she quiet just because she says she is? Or is my experience of her what really counts – if people think you’re outgoing, are you outgoing, despite what you think of yourself? Are you an introvert because Myers Briggs tells you that you are? Who is your real you?
I’ve never really got to an answer to the question; neither I guess have the psychological, philosophical and theological community so I don’t feel too stupid. Isaac Newton’s third law of Motion states that ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Without reaction, an action can’t really be said to have occurred – the reaction almost defines that action.
Something did occur to me after my friend left. If I had lived my life on a desert island, never having met another human being, would I be shy? Would I be tall if there was no Yvonne, Da Eun or Jennie Bond around me to compare my height with? Would I be male if there was no female? Who am I – really?
Isaac Newton argues that action and reaction are inextricably linked – the one defines the other. Community life similarly offers us all, able and less able, shy and loud, tall and short, an opportunity to be, to exist, to define ourselves through our relationships, to offer a place for us to act and be.
Psalm 68 states that ‘God sets the lonely in families’; he roots the lost – all of us – in community where we can find identity and meaning.
So perhaps the conclusion of all this is that without ‘community’ or society, there is no ‘me’.
- does it make a noise?
- do the other trees point and laugh?
- does anyone care?
We said goodbye and I returned to Rainbow house for supper. But on the way home I was left wondering – what is she? Is she quiet just because she says she is? Or is my experience of her what really counts – if people think you’re outgoing, are you outgoing, despite what you think of yourself? Are you an introvert because Myers Briggs tells you that you are? Who is your real you?
I’ve never really got to an answer to the question; neither I guess have the psychological, philosophical and theological community so I don’t feel too stupid. Isaac Newton’s third law of Motion states that ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Without reaction, an action can’t really be said to have occurred – the reaction almost defines that action.
Something did occur to me after my friend left. If I had lived my life on a desert island, never having met another human being, would I be shy? Would I be tall if there was no Yvonne, Da Eun or Jennie Bond around me to compare my height with? Would I be male if there was no female? Who am I – really?
Isaac Newton argues that action and reaction are inextricably linked – the one defines the other. Community life similarly offers us all, able and less able, shy and loud, tall and short, an opportunity to be, to exist, to define ourselves through our relationships, to offer a place for us to act and be.
Psalm 68 states that ‘God sets the lonely in families’; he roots the lost – all of us – in community where we can find identity and meaning.
So perhaps the conclusion of all this is that without ‘community’ or society, there is no ‘me’.
‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, …as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.’
John Donne, 1624.
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