Stray Bolts

Storms rock. There's the sunshine afterward to look forward to.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

A Thought

"Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain."

We tend to be of the mindset, or at least subconsciously think, that "mysteries" are most efficiently solved through hard thinking. However, oftentimes we realise that some things just have to be learnt intuitively and cannot be memorised from any textbook. Sports illustrate this. You can read about perfect form and strategies and teamwork all you want, but when you try to translate this to the playing field, it takes much more than just elucidation from a textbook to guide you through. It takes practice, practice, and more practice. Hence, the "hands" are more useful here than the "intellect".

But the hands and the intellect need not work exclusively. They work together for a myriad of situations. The unsung heroes known as construction workers utilise both their mind and muscles to do their job; pushing, lifting, moving objects while using their experience to think of where the said objects go. Some may defy the notion, saying that construction is hardly a "mystery" but rather a mundane menial task. I ask you then, could you possibly tell me of the calculations that lead to pillars being placed at oh-so-specific locations? If you can, then haven't you learnt a thing or two about physics or architecture? What we usually classify as a "mystery" in this aspect is nothing more than a lack of knowledge concerning the topic.

But it is not just the hands and the head which are required to illuminate mysteries. The heart also plays a role. Sometimes, we find ourselves at a point where logic fails, and there is no choice but to go along with instinct. Take emotions as an example. We can explain the logic of why some emotions lead us to do some things, but we are nowhere near explaining why we have emotions in the first place. And we act on our emotions, without even understanding how they come about. Our brains "struggle in vain" to rationalise what we do, but in the end, we sometimes act without thinking anyway. This 'follow your heart' phenomenon is the reason why we grasp things sometimes without even knowing why. It is also the reason why there are such people as Literature students.