Eyes of the Beholder In the essay On Habit, Alain de Botton explores how people are habituated and believe there is nothing interesting to find nearby. After reading Xavier de Maistre’s bedroom journey and traveling around the neighborhood, De Botton states that most of experience people have generated by their mindset that they approach places they think they have already know. They are not curious about things appear in their daily life. And yet what are the mindset people should have while experiencing? People’s satisfaction and dissatisfaction depend on their experience with their expectation. Expectation is the belief about something might happen in the future. It can be people’s wish or the last thing they want. The conformation of …show more content…
By being wide-eyes people will be able to see new worlds and have experience which is normally rare and far different from what they have gained before. They are hidden behind the surface of their normal life and habituation. People who are curious and humble have new expectations always that drive them to explore. Instead of being bored, they feel interested at and appreciate their life. “I forced myself to obey a peculiar kind of mental command: to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit.”(De Botton 63) Instead just walking on a street, De Botton chooses to observe the building around him. He gains happiness and even gains ideas. He begins to think why he liked railway arches and motorway. Expecting out of the box enables people to have new experience. Once people approach new places and new things with humility, they make experience more …show more content…
But De Maistre doesn’t have to move from boring daily life to a marvelous world to travel. He can stay in his room and enjoy it. What important is the way people perceive during experience, with an impatient mood or with an appreciate heart. When people are frustrated with some experience because they did not match what they expected, it is time to get clear for themselves about what them were expecting and why. Being patient and tolerant can help people feel easier. They are persuading themselves to accept the bad experience and comforting themselves that it doesn’t matter thus experience much readily. Furthermore, people might have never noticed that things before and have some misunderstand. In order to reverse the habituation, people can choose to manage their mindset and expectation. Managing their expectation and thus they might have a new
In her article, Greene reflects on Alfred Schultz’s idea of wide-awkeness as a “sense of achievement, a type of awareness” (Greene, 1978). She goes on to explain that as teachers and students we must be aware of our surroundings. The habits we submerge ourselves in as human beings become mundane. I think about our morning routine: alarm goes off, shower, get dressed, makeup, hair, wake up kids, a couple of “hurry up get your shoes on”, get into car, drive for half-hour, drop off at daycare, arrive at school, proceed through the day. This happens every single morning. We rarely deviate from our routine and it is exactly what Greene calls “habitual activities” (p. 42).
-Outsiders improve their society and allow people to express their kindness and bring out their true selves.
Herbert Otto, an esteemed author, once wrote, “Change and growth take place when a person has risked themselves and dares to become involved in experimenting with their own life” (Wilderdom: A Project in Natural Living & Transformation). Essentially, Otto is saying that in order to grow as a person and become educated, one must break free from what bring him or her comfort, which allows him or her to be daring and adventurous. Christopher McCandless holds a similar view point on education and experimentation or adventure, which can be seen in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. McCandless believes that once people find a way to break free from the default and comfortable setting that so many of us function on, are we able to discover our adventurous
how they want and try new things without people judging one another. He states that “as the
Walker Percy in his essay tells us that the experience of humans nowadays are very insignificant because of biased awareness. Percy thinks that humans lack the true experience while doing or going somewhere just because of the “beaten track”. A person can truly experience wonderful things just if they get off the beaten track. Percy writes, “It may be recovered by leaving the beaten track.” (Percy 299) Every time Percy is trying to tell this he proves it by giving various examples. His one example was how a tourist goes to see the Grand Canyon and has already a lot of preconceived expectations to that place. But when he reaches there he feels let down because all he assumed was wrong and just a fantasy. (298) Percy writes, “This dialectic of sightseeing cannot be taken into account by planners, for the object of the dialectic is nothing other than the subversion of the effort of the planners.” (Percy 300) the sightseer can only recover from all this by leaving the beaten track. (299)
... time thinking about OUR wants and how long the wait is but spend the time being happy with what we have because others may not have the same pleasures. Wallace’s idea of not getting caught up in our default setting is true. We shouldn’t make things about ourselves but make everything about what we can do for others.
In his article “Why We Travel,” Paul Theroux talks about how short term travelers, which are people who are traveling for short periods of time, experience the same type of fear that long term travelers and movers encounter. Theroux states, “Throughout history the traveler has been forced to recognize the fact that leaving home means a loss of innocence, encountering uncertainty” (Theroux). For the longest time, in America it was thought that this loss of innocence and encounter with uncertainty was all a part of the experience, and that the risk was well worth the reward. But that theory has long been thrown out the window according to Arthur Brooks, because in his article “How to Get Americans Moving Again,” he writes about an America that is unmoving, and unwilling to travel, partially due to these
...iance, readers are capable of seeing how citizens in the world today try to be independent of others and sustain their personal beliefs and philosophy. Individuals have to put an end to conformity and trying to be a duplication of everyone else because they will never achieve success if they never decide for themselves. A person must not rely on the judgment and minds of others and learn to think for him or herself since depending on others only exhibits a person’s inferiority to larger institutions. People must stop using travel as an excuse to evade personal problems because if they do not have a direct confrontation with the dilemma, trying to escape will only lengthen it. People in today’s society must appreciate this work so they will approve of their individuality and be stronger in fighting against everyone else that disagrees with their personal philosophy.
...physical world and knowledge. If someone is comfortable or maybe trapped in a world of confusion, madness or blindness then they need help, love, and care is all. Dillard putting herself in the shoes of cataract surgery patients is caring. Socrates and Plato realizing that people see things differently because of the lives they lead are insightful. King creating horror stories and telling his readers why they love them is entertaining. So a good perception is key to staying sane and discovering the unknown in the safest way.
When I examined my travel log the thing that stuck out to me the most was the way that my interaction with space changed depending on who I was with. When I'm by myself I have a pretty basic routine and a very set route I move along but when I'm working or with friends everything changes. I work as a nanny for a family who lives outside the city and when I'm working my interaction with space changes; I go different places, I drive a different car, and take different paths, and even “occupy” a different stage of life. When I'm with friends we travel as a group which changes the way we travel and we are much less goal oriented in our movement than I am when I'm by myself. My interactions with people are the main factors that lead to variation
to the fact that not everything is as well as it seems and that this
Openness to experience is a measure of depth, breadth and variability in a person's imagination
of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we
Learning initially begins with one's attitude toward themselves, others, and the world we live in. It is our attitudes that play a major role in shaping our experiences, which in turn affects the way in which we learn. We must first be able to interpret the world using information we already know, in order to understand something entirely new. As a teacher, I could only hope that I can provide children with a positive educational experience, one that will broaden the scope in which they view themselves, others, and the world on a larger scale. Children already acquire a desire to learn, however, it is up to us to sti...
Albert Camus, an existentialist writer, believed that boredom or waiting, which is essentially the breakdown of routine or habit, caused people to think seriously about their identity,...