[Glass Joe]

Originally Posted by The Wise Turtle

The worst thing we can learn as we grow up is that things are "supposed" to be a certain way. We don't start out that way, but most of us are forced into believing this, and it does us a great disservice, because when reality hits, and things don't always turn out the way we expect them to, we suffer. If we can somehow communicate to our young friends and family the idea that nothing is absolute or perfect in this universe, I think we will find that they grow up to be far healthier and happier than they would if they were given the impression that the universe was a black vs. white or true vs. false kind of place.

One of the best lessons I ever encountered in my life was gained from reading a book on scientific/mathematical complexity and fuzzy logic. It taught me, literally, that the difference between day and night is relative.

It also occurs to me that all of those lovely brown bears are unique and all them are also the same, depending on how you choose to look at them. Sometimes you need to move in a little closer to see the unique or similar qualities, while other times the similarities and differences are obvious from far way. But always there are some similarities and some differences. So, while the non-traced bear may have many obvious special qualities that make her stand out from the crowd, she also has many obvious qualities that she shares with all her companions (being brown, being rounded, being two dimentional, etc.). It's good to be different and creative and expressive and it's good to share things with others too, like compassion, goals, health, and ideas.

Anyway, thanks for sharing (!) those lovely bears with us, Steve!

-Turtle

Originally Posted by billybrads

hallelujah!!! u r quite wise aren't u

Agreed. Thanks for the wise comments Turtle.

Last night, for some strange reason, I felt like writing a "chapter 2" to the brightest bear story. But I didn't post it above because I never finished it and I didn't think it contributed anything to the thread.

But here is what I wrote so far.

Although quite perturbed at first, almost all of the grumpy brown bears eventually came around to loving their new neighbor. After living with the new bear they nicknamed "whitey" for a while, they came to see that they too were all different from one another as well. They started to notice that some of their fellow brown bears had longer noses, while some had shorter noses. And some brown bears had larger muscular bodies which made them stronger, while others had leaner bodies which made them faster. They saw that some bears were naturally better at playing basketball, while others were better at football. While still others preferred more artistic or analytical pursuits.

Because of their bright colored neighbor, (almost) all the other brown bears began to see that even their color "brown", which once unified them together, was beginning to blur. The so-called "brown" bears saw that each bear had different shades of brown and each had different textures of fur that reflected light differently. They started to ask each other philosophical questions like "What is 'brown', really?", "Is there an ultimate brown?", and "If tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it, is the tree still brown?"

Sure, some of the brown bears resisted this new world view and lived the rest of their lives in quiet desperation as they longed to go back to the old days of just being brown, when times were simpler. (One grumpy bear even went so far as to write "The Brown Bear Manifesto".) But eventually their umbrella unifying word "brown" lost most, if not all, meaning to most of the bears. They preferred using richer words to define their colors. They much more preferred to use words like "maple", "chocolate", "sepia", "taupe", and "burlywood #3".