OMW

The OMW, One Minute Writer, is a fantastic blog with a great premise.  (There's a link at the bottom of the page if you want to participate as well.) For those who don't want to click, the basic idea is that, in one minute ONLY, you write a response to the day's thought exercise.  It's great for keeping the skills sharp and, honestly, is one of the more productive 60 seconds one has in a day.  :) 

In short, expect to see these from time to time.

Today's OMW was this: Write about one way you haven't changed since you were 13 years old.

Here was my 60 second response:

I still am overly chagrined by mocking. Some days it feels like I never grew out of that disproportional preteen phase when everything is changing and no one notices except when you trip.

April 18, 2011 11:49 AM

Feel free to post your own in the comments.

-Lissa Rhys-

So here we go, into transitions

I've written in journals for years but this is a new experience - it's not that I've been avoiding blogging, just perhaps a bit on the biased side towards ink and paper. Still, even if no one reads this but myself, the nature of blogging at least means that I will still have my musings around in future years - provided that I don't just want to forget that I was ever young and idealistic.

There is a bittersweetness to life right now. As a graduating college senior I am understanding, perhaps more thoroughly than I ever have before, the mixture of joy and sadness that comes with transitions. Looking back through my studies, I see that this idea is not a new one but rather one that has been explored across time and culture. In the Odyssey, the idea of victory containing grief is one of the major themes and, while I can't match Homer I at least hope to understand this concept more for insight into my own life.

It has been my experience that Western modern culture has a penchant for placing things into their own little niches, for creating binary oppositions, for categorizing and pigeonholing. The gray areas of life are merely confused, straddling the fence, or in need of a deeper look that will classify them once and for all. From Descartes onward there has been a split in ourselves - it's time to pull ourselves together. As one who lives in said Western culture, I think it is time to again explore our identities.

The joy and sadness I spoke of as a graduate - are these truly separate emotions? Joy at having worked hard and succeeding, sadness at leaving this phase of my life behind? On the surface maybe, but I find that the more I delve within myself, the more difficult it is to pry them apart. Instead, I find the need to recognize this emotion as something else, an entity in and of itself. It is more than bittersweetness; it is a feeling of loss through victory. If there is a word for it in English, I don't know it. So to perform a bit of neologism - it is malvictos.