A View of A Life
From There to Here
Frank Gehry’s design of the Stada Center at MIT embodies the themes of chaos, collision, synthesis and surprise.
Architecture & Metaphor -- Here's an approach to getting your ideas organized so you can present them on a journal web page...The Process: Look around until you see something that you could use to help express some of the ideas in your life story. For example, the Stada building at MIT has an interesting look and offers elements that could be used to represent ideas in a person's life story.
It's interesting to note that the architect, Frank Gehry, thought he'd design the buidling with a few themes in mind: chaos, collision, symmetry and surprise. Photos of parts of the building might be ways of capturing reflections on those themes that could be used to reflect on similar themes in a person's life.
SURPRISE!
Life is always a great surprise to me. Growing up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, I thought I'd always live there, be like my parents working in a manufacturing plant making parts for telephones. Becoming a fixture in the Merrimack Valley wasn't something I was interested in doing. It looked boring to me, there weren't any jobs that seemed worth doing, and none of the adults I met looked very happy with the way their lives had turned out.
CHAOS!
For years life seemed like just a lot of chaos to me. I like to do one thing at a time and keep everything in nice, neat little packages that have clear beginnings, middles and ends. Instead I found out that I had to do things when I was able to do them and when the conditions were right to ensure success. COLLISION!
The more I learned in school and from traveling to other places, the more things seemed to collide. New ideas and considering things from different points of view can be challenging sometimes. I grew up in New England but my brother married someone from Texas so I had to learn about the way people lived in other parts of the United States if I really wanted to understand my new sister-in-law. In China a guy in a uniform took my passport and kept it while I traveled by train into the countryside. Until I got that passport back, I felt a type of nervousness I never experienced in the United States.
SYMMETRY!
And then I started to see the symmetry of things. Patterns started to emerge; a logical progression of events that could be traced back to uncover the cause and effect of things became apparent. Life isn't a mystery so much as it's something hard to see when your right up close and busy living it. Instead of assembling telephone parts in a factory, I work in a library managing 33 people and handling a half-a-million dollar budget. I use what I've learned in school and in life to select and organize information resources that support learning and help people understand the world they live in just a little bit better. I think education and better understanding, mixed with some compassion and an innate human need to do what's right helps keep the dark side of life in balance with the light.
I didn't know what I wanted. Nothing in my world was the right thing for me so I had to trust that there must be more to life than I could see from my little corner of the universe. I'd have to trust that work and passion would get me to a better place, whatever that might be. There were times when I found myself starting a new job, meeting new friends, getting married, becoming an aunt, registering for school, and moving all at the same time!
In my job, I don't do just what people tell me to do according to a productivity efficiency report imposed by my boss. My days are a lot more interesting than that because I get to work with people instead of machine parts. People come to me with questions and I help them find their own answers. I use proven research techniques, computer skills, follow methods of deductive and inductive reasoning and take advantage of a good deal of luck to make myself useful to students who want to develop their skills so they can be useful to their families and their communities.
It's a lot of fun and now SURPRISE is something I experience all the time!
