I ❤ frameworks
I am a sucker for frameworks and principles, for they short-circuit great decision making. From what I have noticed- there is a strong pareto in the kind of problems we face so the useful frameworks compound rather quickly.
Now you tell me- ain’t that worthy of ❤?
So Tagore says…
TLDR: Life happens on nothing but the canvas of death
I had picked up Rereading Tagore on an impulse buying spree at the Oxford book store back in Jan’21. I was on a week long no-agenda break and I decided to spend sunny winter afternoons revisiting fiction after a ~7 year hiatus. I love serendipity!
Level-1: raw interpretation 😶
- Canvas- Everything we do can be imagined as strokes of paint on our canvas. Trippy thought experiment- what if our mind was the painter and our body is stuck in the 3-D canvas.
- Inevitability of death- While all colors and creative are transient, one thing remains. Tagore probably didn’t take taxes very seriously but let’s leave that for another day.
Level-2: subjectivity is the shizz 🤔
- Equating life to the dance of paint brush on a canvas nullifies all absolute truths. What if I told you there’s no such thing as the truth, perspective and consequence is all that is there.
- This in turn invokes the thought of how it is impossible for two individuals to have the same perspective at the core. Each one of us is a combination of different perspectives and choses to do different things with it, and that’s completely okay. Entropy ftw. 🚀
Level-3: real world analogies 🙀
This is where it gets really interesting (or maybe I’m overfitting, let me know!)
- No two canvases are the same and there is no way to compare
- Some artists are innate and others operate on inspiration- similar to how individuals operate on varying degree of mimesis
- Different artists fall for different styles, similar to how all people optimise different things in life and some advocate that their metric is the best
- Having money is like getting more glitter, better brushes, paints et al in your arsenal. Affinity towards style dictates affinity towards money.
- Relationships are like bringing canvases closer and making the overall view bigger. You can only have so many close relationships. Closest relationships are the ones where you start merging canvases, higher the overlap closer they are. If you imagine a good output from merging two canvases their boundaries would merge in texture, that signifies adjustment on the part of both the artists. Too much overlap would kill individuality of the paintings and the artist. Taking the two merged paintings away will always leave a mark and sometimes a tear on the canvas.
- Violence is akin to going around tearing other artists’ paintings
- It is impossible to put two colors on the same spot, tradeoffs are real
- If you have to stare at the same canvas all day long you will paint some damn thing. Most humans operate out of boredom, stagnation and mimesis.
- Paintings don’t fade on their own but the sense of stagnation pushes artists to make it either better or worse, similar to how nothing remains constant in life
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Like every framework- this is an evolving one. Would love for you to write back with your meaning to this or any other thing for that matter (the eigen of all of it is pretty convergent 🙃).
Until next time!
