What are my influences? What makes me who I am? What makes me believe what I believe?
I fear water thanks to a movie I watched when I was eight. I lack trust in relationships because of a few gone wrong. I believe the creation of something that cannot naturally be uncreated is fundamentally immoral. Why?
Why is it that I can’t cry?
Why is it that I fear armed robbery?
We look to Thomas Edison as if he were the one who lit the first light and then look for what it were that would influence such a mind. If we can reflect on his brilliance, it should only be that we admire his grasp on the times. The creation of light came well before the patent. He fashioned modern methodology into a convenient version. It’s like celebrating the Edmund Hillarys of the world without a recognition of the Tenzing Norgay.
We strive for an individualism in the face of an overwhelming manifestation of the collective thought. I’m humbled to think I am but a slight murmur in the orchestra of sound emanating from the edges of a galaxy.
“It has been a long road…From a mountain coolie, a bearer of loads, to a wearer of a coat with rows of medals who is carried about in planes and worries about income tax.”—Tenzing Norgay