Judge me not

As we grow, we learn to be what the people in our environment expect us to be. For someone who is shy in school to stand out and be an achiever is really, really difficult because everyone around him/ her is expecting nothing to come out of the person's mouth.
For someone, who through the pressures of high school, became the village idiot in order to entertain everyone around him adn become popular, or someone who was forced into, excuse the language, the title of "bitch", it's something that's really hard to shake. So instead of shaking it, you'd rather just play into it and cement that thought.

Social media--and i mean of the twitter kind, not the fb kind, where u link to people other than those who knew u before,
is cool because it allows u to be whoever u want to be. Not who you're expected to be by the society u live in.


I deleted my first two blogs because I didn't follow this online media rule and told all the people I knew in real life about them. But then I felt
so restrained because there were a limited number of things I could say when I knew which people would be reading it.

I listened to a tedtalk video today that really spoke to me. It says, we don't become more creative as we grow, but we are born creative and as we grow we lose more and more of that creativity. The reason, Ken Robinson gave in his tedtalk, was that we are too scared of judgement as we grow older.
We don't just try things to see how they turn out and when we stop doing that, we inhibit ourselves. Instead of failing, we choose not to try.
Ken Robinson believes this is something we learn at school.

He's right, but it's more than just a problem with the 'syllabus'. I think it's a problem with humankind. We're all quick to judge each other and to stop anyone who strays from the pack.

We want them back to what is "normal" because "normal" is good and "different" is bad.

It's even entrenched in religion. Like Hamza Yusuf says in his book "purification of the heart", religions that propogate ancestral worship, propogate a sense of shame before man. Don't do this or that, because the elders will look down on it.
In Islam we don't have this kind of ancestral propogation, but as muslims we practice it anyway. Many of the things we do don't come from the quran and hadith, but rather, from the opinions of other muslims.

Modern cultures hold each other together in much the same way. Even if it's not a 'religious' thing, there's always a set of invisible rules governing the way u live.


The old IBM slogan really spoke to me because it was so simple and unconstrained. Think. That was the motto. No guidelines on how or when or why.
No guidelines/restrictions on what age u need to be to think and what kind of thinking would be acceptable.

Think*