It’s amazing.. how simply complex the world is. How our minds are able to reduce things so infinitely complex into ideas we are able to ‘comprehend’. You know every time in English class your teacher asks you to write a summary? I may be wrong on this one… but I feel like it’s an insult to the writer, especially a good one, if you are supposed to take a few hundred/thousand worded essay and reduce it to a simple 60-100 word paragraph. That’s right, reduce.

It’s even easier to imagine the insult you deal to the writing/writer when you imagine the essay as a person. I mean, imagine what we do every single day of our lives. Let’s say we brush by a simple person at the coffee store (my place most frequented). Another fellow NYU student perhaps. If you were to strike up a conversation with that person, the most you would ever get to perhaps is that he studies in Steinhardt and is a Music Composition major. That he frequents Starbucks coz he has to stay up every night and finish his Writing The Essay assignments after composing wtv music he has to compose. That he hates WTE too and would rather focus all his time on music composition. That the next time you see each other that is the scope of conversation you will most probably never break through. And then you go on with life as if that person didn’t really exist to you. Because really, who is he to you? Just another random guy at the coffee store.

But the truth is, every person you brush past at any coffee shop is more complex than that. You know that, but you never really know that. Because you have other things to do, other people to think about. Other complexities to figure out. It’s just like watching a 3D film in the cinemas. It is only when you understand that each eye has to work separately yet in unison to combine two individual images together do we see a three-dimensional picture.

Three-dimensional.

Three-dimensional.

Try fitting imagination into the scope of your reality. Or reality into into the expansive world of your imagination.

…

…

..

Two-dimensional.

That’s what our brains are doing to us. Tricking us to believe that everybody around us is merely two-dimensional. Because if everything really were in three dimensions, we would explode with the massive load of informations coming into our brains. Too much, too much.

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Just a sidenote:

I think there’s one striking difference between Western and Asian education. In Asia, the emphasis is on doing, on getting to the main point and mostly disregarding the rest. In the West, the emphasis is on understanding each and every step, which is as important as getting to the main point (which can be annoying at times when one’s intellect is limited =/). Sorry to say, but IMO the Asian education system advocates reduction to the max, whereas the Western education to a certain extent, not so much.

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And the irony is, I’ve always thought ideas were simple, but people deliberately made them complicated for stupid reasons. Of course, sometimes that is the case. That people do complicate things for no reason. But it’s not really for no reason. The reason is probably too complicated to be put in a mere paragraph. That clearly was ignorance on my part. When something seems too simple to be true… people get suspicious right? Haha.

I guess the issue I’m concerned with is striking a balance between complexity and simplicity. Because it really is not all that simple, yet it could be?