February 17th, 2010
try something new: TED Talks
When I was in Italy this past summer, I did not have a television. “Ah, no problem,” I thought. “I won’t need a TV! I’ll be in Italy! Who would watch TV in Italy! It would be a crime!”
Well, then. About that.
It’s not that I “needed” television so much as sometimes, in the afternoons when the sun was a sweltering and humid 99 degrees, and I’d already sketched, photographed, done yoga, studied Italian, read a book, cleaned up my little studio apartment and could not venture out in the heat for fear of collapsing on the cobbled streets, I needed a way to just deprogram.
Now, I know, I know. It has become the new hipster thing to get rid of your television. It’s the very definition of not being commercial and leading a more meaningful life. I’ll happily join the hipster brigade on that one, because when we moved into our new place, we did not put a television in the living room. Andy has one back in his “man cave” (the guest house out back that he uses as his office), but that’s really for sports. If we watch “television” these days, it’s on a laptop in the living room. Episodes of The Office and that sort of thing; whatever we can download on Netflix. Usually that means I end up watching a lot of documentaries, and far less television than I used to.
When I’m not watching Netflix, I’ll watch TED, since just one or two of these talks that average 28 minutes can really be a perfect little lunchtime accompaniment.
Even better? TED talks don’t ROT YOUR BRAIN, the way regular TV does. When I was in Italy and had no television, I figured out that TED talks can be downloaded for free–so I would download them onto my little iTouch, a bunch at once that seemed interesting, and then I’d have something to watch.
This talk, referenced above, is by Eve Ensler (yes, creator of The Vagina Monologues). It touched my heart so deeply over lunch the other day, because I, too, am an EMOTIONAL girl, someone who feels things deeply, someone who spent years thinking there was something wrong with being “emotional” and swallowed her tears until she had that throat-chokey feeling, and someone who now cries openly when I think of women in other countries who put up with atrocities that I cannot even imagine, yet emerge with something one might call “Hope.”
I’m also a huge fan of this Tim Brown talk on creativity and play, because I think it speaks so deeply to what happens to us as we adults get older and start thinking of creativity differently.
I’m curious–why do you think it is that as we get older, we are more likely to deny ourselves things like emotions, or creativity? Why do you think it is that we, as a society, start to push away those aspects of ourselves?
Interestingly, it seems like research is pointing us more and more back in the right direction–of valuing play, valuing emotion.
