My cold has escalated to plague from hell and I’ve taken the day off work to recuperate (read: rock backwards and forwards in bed). I’ve been reading a book by John Langdon called Wordplay – The Philosophy, Art and Science of Ambigrams. The idea of an ambigram is to write a word and mutate the letters, so while still readable, the have some degree of symmetry (rotational/mirror) and so that the final ambigram is also a visual representation of the word. You can see some of the examples from his book on his website – I really like Art&Science/Philosophy and Waterfall.
The book has also spoken a lot to me about balance/control/power – it talks a lot about YingYang and the ideas behind Taoism. One of the parts I read today that deeply affected me was the section entitled “Choice/Decide”. Every day people say “I have to go to work”, “I’m obliged to pay my gas bill”, “I need to walk the dog” or “I must write a blog entry”. Fundamentally you feel like you have to do these things, and there may be negative outcomes if you don’t, but realistically you don’t HAVE to do them – you decide that you are going to do them, but you could equally decide “fuck it, I’m not going to, I’ll deal with consequences as they arise”. The author advocates trying to alter your speech/thoughts to represent the true power/control you possess over everyday situations, to realise that all these “have to” moments are actually unconscious choices and to rephrase them: “I choose to go to work”, “I decide to pay my gas bill”, “I wish to walk the dog” and “I want to write a blog entry”.
Sometimes I feel I don’t have any control over my actions. For example I haven’t been able to eat much today, but I still purged once. I felt like I had to – like I didn’t have a choice. But I did. I do have a choice on whether I act on these urges. And I think it’s really important that I never forget that.
This is a scan from the above mentioned book - interlocking mirror image ambigrams of the words Choice and Decide (I find the lattice pattern very soothing):
PS - thank you for recent comments, because I'm ill at home I don't have stamina to go round many blogs today, but normal operating will resume soon (I hope).
I love the ambigram. I've seen them before, they are fascinating. What you said about choice and deciding was very important to my recovery. Right at the beginning I drilled it into my head that I was choosing to recover. I think all too often people feel as if they HAVE to recover, and so begin to resent it and want to return to the illness - whereas by insisting to myself that I could relapse whenever I wanted to but I was choosing to do recovery as thoroughly as possible first, I blocked off a whole load of ways into my head that the ED might try to take. It was one of the most important aspects of my recovery, and it's so interesting to hear that it spoke to you as well.
ReplyDeleteI hope you feel better soon! Don't worry about commenting on blogs, we won't forget you ;)