79 Days of TOK

Wow, we’re really bad at updating this blog, aren’t we?  Then again, Elizabeth and Rachel are both crazy-busy while I have no life, working two days a week and that’s it.  So I have no excuse.

Anyway, a lot of stuff has happened to me (I guess to my family, really) this summer and it’s really changed the way I think about things.  And I mean reallychanged.  And this kinda goes back to my first post about guilt: “how we never really realize what we have until it’s gone.”  This little adage has really started ringing true for me because over the past couple of months, I’ve come very close to losing some things very dear to me.  I won’t go into detail, but it’s been scary and more than enough to push my train of thought into motion.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that this summer has put a lot plethora of things (there you go, Chap!) into perspective for me and I’ve definitely learned my lesson about taking things for granted.  So from now on, I’m going to try to 1) be more open-minded about other people’s trials and tribulations because even though their struggle may seem to be less important than mine, it’s still important; 2) acknowledge and enjoy the good things I have while I still have them because in the end, everything is only temporary; and 3) allow myself to be weak and cry, because I’m only a teenager and I can’t be steely-strong all the time.

-Taylor

And you may think I’m crazy or that this makes no sense at all, but I’m completely serious.

What if the colors we perceive when we see the world are not the same colors that others perceive when they see it?  Like, what if we all see bananas as yellow, but my yellow looks like your purple?

I don’t know, I’m really bad at phrasing this the way I want it to sound.  It all makes sense in my head.  I guess it kinda has to go with subjective experiences (which is what I wrote my ToK paper on this past semester) and how we are the knower.

You know what I mean?

-Taylor

When I came up with the idea for this blog my original intention was to a fair number of gag photos mixed in with some actual TOK thoughts. Mostly stuff along the lines of  ”Here is Elizabeth standing next to Paul Revere with her TOK book” or “look at Taylor reading while swimming” or other such nonsense. Maybe I will still do that but for the moment I have plenty of thoughts to put into writing.

I am currently on vacation in a little town on Lake Erie, which is really a very neat place, lots of old Victorian era cottages and giant trees, generally a great place to kick back and do some thinking. But the thing thats got me thinking today happened last night on the drive up. When my family was about 20 minutes away from the town a car in front of us slowed down to gawk at a garage sale, my father was able to stop the car in time, which was no small feat because we were towing a sailboat, but the lady behind us did not and ended up rear-ending us. No body was hurt, the cars are dented, the boat has some cosmetic scratches, but the trailer is smashed to bits. All in all it could have been much worse.

The part that I’ve got playing over and over in my head is the different ways my mother and I reacted to the crash. My mother says that right as we got the car under control after avoiding the car in front of us she had been thinking “Oh good, im glad nothing happened,” and the then next second she felt a large impact and hear a loud crunching noise and immediately thought we had been hit by three or four cars (it was only one). My experience was completely different. I saw the car in front of us slow down, felt us stop, then felt a small bump and heared a creaking and groaning sound from the back of the car. I did not realize we had been hit until I looked out the window and saw it. They way my mother and I reacted really surprised me. I’m usually the one that freaks out during a crisis, not mom. I’ve been thinking about this since then and I’ve come to the conclusion that a big factor in our differing reactions was experiences with driving. I’ve only been driving for a short time, she’s been driving for 30 years and really knows how dangerous driving can be.

In class we often talked about how different factors shape our experiences such as religion, upbringing, our emotions at the time and other factors. This was the first time that I’d considered how timing and familiarity combined can really alter a perspective of a situation. I’m not sure that those are the best terms to describe it, so here are my mother’s and my thought processes at the time:

Mom: *bump* We just got hit! Holy S*** there has to be at least four cars behind us!

Me: *bump* Huh? what did we… what… was that… Holy crap!

But hey, no one was hurt so no harm, no foul. Morale of the story: dont tailgate someone who is pulling a trailer. TOK pictures soon maybe possibly?

-Rachel

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about… guilt, I guess.  Remorse.  And how we never really realize what we have until it’s gone.  Like, it takes something really dramatic and life-changing for people to all of a sudden wake up and realize that they can’t take everything for granted.  But shouldn’t we always think about how much things mean to us when we still have them?  Shouldn’t we wake up every morning thanking God or Allah or science or whatever higher power we believe in for the things that have blessed us by just existing?  We should tell the people we love that we love them at every opportunity we get because we never know when we’ll see them again, you know?  And we shouldn’t wait until death or danger to make amends; if we’ve wronged someone, we should own up to it.  We can’t just live our lives expecting to go to sleep with things one way and then to wake up with everything exactly the same, because that’s not how it works.

And I suppose I’ll close this post with my favorite— and very applicable— quote: “When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.” (Maurice Maeterlinck)

-Taylor

We are three friends - Rachel, Taylor, and Elizabeth - who are all enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program and are about to begin our senior year of high school. As our Theory of Knowledge (TOK) class is split between the last semester of our junior year and the first semester of our senior year, we were given the assignment of “keeping TOK alive” in our own thoughts and ideology over the course of the summer. This assignment is very open to interpretation, but it was essentially the idea of continuing to think about knowledge, as that is what the class is about.

After a few days of summer, Rachel had the idea of creating a blog about “keeping TOK alive” after discovering she was using her TOK book as a mousepad (during a brief period of time that she was not swimming). Taylor added onto this idea by suggesting tumblr. And Elizabeth just kind of went with it, because it sounded pretty cool.

So, yeah, the idea is that we’re going to use this blog to post our TOK thoughts and other ways in which we are keeping it alive during our 79-day summer.