Post 2 - Finding Your Howl Audio Review

             This is my audio review of Jonathon Flaum's "Finding Your Howl", available through the provided link. 

                                  

The Transcript is available below:

Within his article, Jonathon Flaum recalls how in fifth grade, a classmate of his wrote a story about a tiger who wanted to escape from his cage in the zoo.  The tiger planned an escape, but after jumping out of his cage at night, woke up to being inside a large cage in a larger zoo.  This happened time and time again, each time the cage was larger and the zoo was larger and the tiger was more and more discouraged.  There was no ending to this story either, but rather this could go on infinitely.   The torment was infinite and inescapable.  This cyclical pattern of suffering sets a very dark tone for the story, but Flaum gives the reader a glimmer of hope.  The tiger can not escape the cage and the zoo because the cage and the zoo are a part of himself.   If the tiger is to escape the cage, then who the tiger is must die alongside with it, because the cage is a part of the tiger’s identity.  

             Well that truly is a happy moral to the story.  In order to escape torment you have you to die.  Flaum really comes across as a “glass half empty”kind of guy, but theres something to what he says, something below the surface.  Everyone has created an image for him or herself.  We hold onto things that we feel reflect who we are, or represent what we’re all about, and a lot of times, we resent that to which we cling so dearly.  We are trapped, and the only way out is to forget what we were, release who we are, and try to find what we will be.  And this process can feel like death.  It is a dive into the unknown, a risk that leaving it all behind will yield new and greater possibilities.

            The poem I would like to share is “if” by Rudyard Kipling:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

             “If” strikes me as a creative person because the qualities that Kipling say are necessary to truly be a man are qualities that I think are necessary for people who want to work in the creative industry.  Kipling often presents two opposing sides of a quality and urges the reader to find a balance.  He says that if you want to create, you need to dream without being consumed with dreaming, and to think without being lost in thought.  And those examples really resonate in me; I have to dream to create the ideas, and think to make it a possibility, but I will only be successful if I find the appropriate balance.