Sky
As I walk along the Schuylkill River Trail in the morning, I love watching the colors in the sky, the hues, and the light change over time. In the beginning of my walk, it is very dark, but as I get closer and closer to my destination, there is light.
Call to Adventure
How to give life meaning?
We must follow a call to adventure through our will to power.
I’m reminded of my favorite video game that I played as a child, Kingdom Hearts, for the PlayStation. The video game follows the story of Sora, meaning sky in Japanese, and his journey to find Kingdom Hearts. At the beginning of the game, Sora and his friends spawn on Destiny Island. They begin finding wood, tarps, and materials to build a raft and leave the island. Right away, the game gives you this call to adventure, where the main characters in the game are wondering what’s out there. Are there other worlds? What new experiences can we have? As they look out towards the horizon of the ocean, darkness consumes the island, and a portal to darkness appears. Sora’s best friend, Riku, enters the portal and becomes a Nobody, as he is now consumed by evil. However, Sora wields light as his weapon, a Keyblade, that is used to fight against darkness and unlock the door to Kingdom Hearts. Kingdom Hearts represents omnipotent power, knowledge, light, darkness, hope, salvation, and the unknown.
There’s one famous scene from the game where Sora confronts Riku without a weapon. Riku taunts Sora because he does not have a weapon, and Sora responds:
“I don’t need a weapon, my friends are my power!”
In this moment, Sora manifests power through his courage, heart, and the friendship that he’s made along his journey. Sora has this childlike naïveté and optimism in the most dire situations. No matter how dark, he sees the light.
While both good and evil have the will to power and are seeking Kingdom Hearts, people decide how they will live their lives. Sora chose light, and I believe he is a good hero and story to learn from. Through courage, or heart, we can manifest power.
Follow Your Thumos
Meaning:
In Greek, “thumos” originally referred to the spirited aspect of the human psyche, often associated with emotions such as anger, passion, and courage. It denotes a kind of inner fire or spiritedness, embodying a person’s will to fight, strive, or achieve.
Philosophical Context:
Homer: In Homer’s epics, “thumos” is often used to describe the vital force within a person, something that drives them to action and reflects their emotional state.
To give our lives more meaning, perhaps we should embrace the will to power with spiritedness and courage at the forefront. With everything that we do in life, whether simply going for a walk, lifting in the gym, working, making art, or practicing street photography, we should fuel our curiosity with the spirit of play and courageousness. Ultimately, I believe it is power that we seek, and happiness follows.
With a strong sense of purpose, following our desires, not only do we give life meaning, but we affirm life with vitality.
Every morning, I walk along the Schuylkill River Trail as a way to kickstart my day, working on the thing that I love the most, photography. I make an effort to photograph the sunrise each morning, unconsciously, as this is something that I wake up and desire to do immediately. I make sure to take a shower and drink a lot of espresso, heading outside at 5 AM promptly. I believe for two years straight now I haven’t missed a single sunrise. This is important for me as a photographer, as the early morning light is some of the most beautiful in the day. However, you can only witness this time of day with power itself. By getting really good sleep, at least eight hours, I wake up feeling refreshed and energized. I sometimes think, with my imagination, that George Washington and his men were walking along this trail at some point not so long ago, as they marched from Valley Forge along the Schuylkill River during the Revolutionary War. There are echoes of history, stories, and even mythology, or made-up stories from video games such as Kingdom Hearts, that flow through me, through memory, when I walk along the river. I think we should embrace this inner desire to manifest power through following the light and embracing our inner hero. Whether it is Washington, Sora, Achilles, Hercules, or Jesus, we can use the stories of these heroes to fuel our lust for life.
How I Focus
Every night before I go to sleep, I assume that I will not wake up. I treat each night like a mini-death, and each morning like a mini-birth.
If today were your last day on earth, where would you start your day?
I choose the Schuylkill River and the cliff behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art as my respawn point. I enjoy looking out towards the horizon, the beautiful architecture, trees, water, waterfall, and clouds in the sky. When I watch the sunrise, it reminds me how open this world is, and how there are endless things to do and to explore. I have this call to adventure deep within me each and every day, giving my life direction and purpose through the creation of photography and art.
You can create a new world in a fraction of a second.
The superpower of photography lies in its ability to give meaning to the mundane. When you walk the same lane every single day, you will always find something new to create, from seemingly nothing. There is an infinite number of ways in which you can make photographs. Treat the world as a canvas, and create your own world through the medium of photography.
Wield the camera as a sword, strike through the heart of chaos, reveal the soul of the street, and create visual order and harmony through the spontaneity of everyday life.
When you wake up in the morning, focus on the things you care about most in life. For me, that is photography.
The Spirit of Play
Why are people so serious in this modern world?
I think that we killed our creativity and imagination, and part of it is to blame the polluted air in the sky. I will never forget being a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, Africa, where I would spend my evenings looking up at the cosmos, gazing at the galaxy, the colors, hues, light, and shooting stars cast across the sky. Each night I would share stories with my host father, Bill, who would describe to me biblical stories, myths, and even explain how there was witchcraft in the village. I couldn’t believe my ears when he told me about the magical crocodiles and witches in the villages that were responsible for the deaths of children. There are still places in the world that revolve their lives around these stories and myths.
The most fundamental source of vitality in any community is water itself. When he described to me the crocodiles in the water, I was afraid to even visit the water. Working in aquaculture as a volunteer, my goal was to create new ways to acquire food security. I spent lots of time in the water, in small boats, and by the lake. Most men in these villages are working as fishermen, as they pull the protein from the water on big nets from wooden boats. Water provides protein through the lake and the fish, and it is also the most fundamental aspect of humanity. Humans are made of primarily water, and we must drink water to survive. At the center of each village, there is a hole or a well. Families gather buckets on their heads and draw water from this source of life. Each day when I would draw my water from the well, I boiled it, filtered it through a gravity filter, added iodine, and then safely consumed it. I slept under a mosquito net, so I would not contract malaria, living a very simple life.
While in these villages, the men and women are working very hard, but there was a lack of seriousness about them that I found interesting. They all were so happy, smiling all day, embracing optimism. Even when working on the farm, we would constantly be making jokes while harvesting maize in the spirit of play. Through hard work and purpose, each member of the village has a role to play. Life is meaningful in a village and because of this the people are happier.
Now that I think about it, I believe the happiest I’ve ever been in my life was when I was completely off the grid in Zambia.
Why?
There was a lack of technology in the village, where I was not connected at all to the world, but living within a tribe in a village.
At the center of the village, there is a church. In the middle of the church, there is an altar where we make a sacrifice and remind ourselves of the archetype, the hero, Jesus, and the sacrifice that he made. Perhaps everyone in the village strives to be like Jesus or the hero. I believe this is something that is lacking in modern society, as we have no direction or hero to strive to be like, which gives life a deeper meaning of purpose. Every weekend, we would gather in the church and learn about the stories of Jesus. This is something that I have cherished since a very young age, from pre-K to 8th grade, up until I was 13 years old. These were some of my most joyous childhood memories: attending Catholic school, praying in church, and playing in the grass outside.
Technology and School
Once I attended public school for high school, everything changed. School began to feel like a prison, as there was an x-ray machine and metal detector, with security guards guarding every door, all of which were locked when you entered the school. You were forced to sit down and memorize useless information: memorizing dates, names, places, and things that you would forget the next day. Very early on, I learned that school was like a prison. I did not like it whatsoever, and so I would skip class, find doors to unlock, and escape out the back so that I could be outside in the grass. There was something very unsettling about my public school education here in Philadelphia, and the way in which you are treated, almost like a factory worker, listening for the bell and going class to class. The irony about public school in America is that everything that we learned is something that I could have learned with the simple use of technology, such as ChatGPT.
Similar to the story of Kingdom Hearts, you can either choose to follow the darkness or the light, wielding technology for good or evil. I choose to use ChatGPT as a way to enhance my everyday life, learn, and grow with this technology. I find it to be extremely useful, and I always use it to learn more. However, if this technology, artificial intelligence, and even robots are used for nefarious purposes, such as warfare, this is where we can find ourselves with some ethical questions and concerns going forward.
Have you ever played Minecraft? You start off by punching trees, gathering wood, building sticks and pickaxes, and then gathering stone. Once you have stone, you can create more powerful weapons, kill zombies, and hunt animals. With the stone, you can gather iron, create even stronger weapons, and build armor. With armor and weapons, we become the apex predators, similar to the way that humans have evolved throughout history.
Think of wars fought with swords and shields, bows and arrows, and how the archers were typically positioned at the top of the castle wall, from the comfort of the citadel, killing the lives of those fighting on the front lines of the battlefield. Humans become very strategic and will assert their dominance and power in the easiest way possible.
This strategic tactic in warfare is similar to the way in which an eagle hunts a goat. The eagle swoops down towards the cliffside, pushing the goat off the cliff, so that it does not need to fight. From there, all the eagle needs to do is swoop down to the bottom of the cliff and begin its feast, as the goat was killed with ease.
Humans are violent, nature is violent, and all is war. However, the more that we advance with technology, the scarier war can become.
I remember after school, in high school, playing Call of Duty Black Ops, where you could use an RCXD remote-controlled car to blow up enemies’ bases by driving it remotely using a controller in the game. There were also Predator Missiles in Modern Warfare 2, where you could control the missiles from a laptop from the comfort of your bunker. The problem with this is, we currently use similar technologies like this in modern life and war.
When I was in Miami recently, I saw these robot dogs delivering food to people automatically. It was very jarring and unsettling, the way in which we use the technology already in 2024. However, imagine in war, where lives are at stake. A young 18-year-old boy, with the power of an Xbox controller, can kill the lives of innocent civilians in a village somewhere in the Middle East.
What will the use of robots and artificial intelligence entail for the future of warfare? Are these uses of technology ethical or unethical?
My thought is, the less human and more detached war becomes, the more dystopian the world will be.
What is the antidote to this?
Strive upwards through the creation of art, towards the sky!