Really, really, really nice question! It has had me thinking for a few days, as well as avidly reading the other posts which have been striking enough chords to keep a lot of guitars strumming.
Here's one perspective which affected me today: One of the things I do is teach English as a second-language. My pet specialty is verb tenses. I have a way of showing students the entire tense construct on one page as well as the process, i.e. the relation of tenses to each other in time. But it isn't enough for the students to communicate in English. Clever as I think my explanation might be, only the students themselves can supply the meaning they want to communicate. The students have to decide what they want to say and learn the words to say it through the structure of grammar. The grammar by itself is nothing. So, that's what living OS does for me on lots of levels. It helps me realise just how responsible I need to be to be free of, free from, free to. In the case above, free to express and communicate. To say it another way. Lots of time and mental effort has been spent on wondering "What's the meaning of life?" as if 'life' was a thing capable of holding meaning on its own. Well, 'existence' is a fact, whereas 'life' is in my opinion a construct or process and so the 'meaning' or 'purpose' or 'content' is really dependent on what the individual decides. By itself, life is neutral. We are born, we live, and when it's over, it's over. What happens after that I don't know, ... and I don't have to know to give my life meaning. I can just decide the meaning of my life. By itself, OS is neutral. But the 4 principles and the Law of Two Feet are like a grammar to help me express the meaning I decide. And pretty much the best one I've found yet. Lex * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
