What intrigued me the most is what was said about her experience that I think relates to many things in life...
“There are no absolute truths.” She believes in the specifics of story and the specifics of the past.
She also believes that “there are never complete answers” and that there is uncertainty in everything - and that is good. If there is uncertainty in everything, she can find something new and in this comes imagination. If She feels what is in the story....she then comes closest to feeling compassion. She has to become the story in order to understand that compassion.
Amy Tan and Shekhar Kapur (previous post “Where does creative inspiration come from”)seem to embrace and find energy in not making sense of the world. Maybe they have understood how to make sense of the incompleteness and ambiguity of life. Amy Tan has learned in many instances to live through uncertainty and to fully embrace a different viewpoint as well as how to integrate her experience within context.
I just finished a TED talk about Amy Tan. She is an Asian American who is the author of such books as the Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Hundred Secret Senses. She is definitely a woman that has lived with ambiguity. There was a sense of mysticism and complexity of understanding the world that I really liked in her talk. While traveling to China in a lower income rural village she took on the mysticism and Confucian values that was so much stronger than her American values.
Published in
Beyond Thought