My Inner Child.

My little two year old breaks into a dance the moment she hears music. I wonder why I cannot be so uninhibited.

She always announces exactly how she feels about anything. I cannot. It seems pointless to announce "I am sad!" or "I am happy". Which adult does that?

She says "I love you" with the ease that only a child can possess. I cannot. That's not something adults say.

She eats only when she is hungry. She does not feel the need to sit down and eat three times a day just because those have been designated as meal times.

When she does eat, she eats with all her senses. Every meal is an adventure, an orgy of smell, sight and touch. I eat mostly because its something I have to do. For adults most meals are brief punctuations in the daily routine.

She wears what she wants. She picks clothes in an instinctive way. She does not care if pink and yellow do not go well together. Adults dress for others. With us its more about how others think we look. A child will never ask you "How do I look Mommy?" because she is sure that she looks great. The Mommy on the other hand......

She is comfortable naked. Totally not self-conscious about her body. We adults on the other hand get nervous at the swimming pool wondering how are bodies are being perceived.

She moves on and never lingers on a past issues. She will never tell me two days later that she was hurt by my refusal to take her to the park. Adults on the other hand.......we will hang on to a perceived slight for days.

And then she will "grow up". Become more of an adult. Responsible, practical, calculating, the child in her gone forever.

I have posted a link to a talk on children's education. It talks about how we need to tap into our inner child to be creative and how our education system is built to kill that kind of creativity.

How schools kill creativity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Its all been done!

A couple of years ago a young author, Kavya Vishwanathan, had her book pulled from the shelves because it turned out that certain passages of her book were almost identical to passages from some other author's books. Unfortunately, being charged with plagiarism can spell the end of an author's career.

This begs the question: How does one define "original" work? What characteristics does this work need to have to be considered truly original? Can anything be truly original? Take a look around and you will see many examples of new work being done that has more than a trace of some earlier work. The music industry is littered with examples of hit songs that have had parts of other songs. I have yet to hear of a singer or a band having their career destroyed because they wrote a hit song that sounded like another hit song!

Show me your favorite piece of software and I guarantee you that it has parts that have been re-used from other software. Just a small portion of any software is the secret sauce; the rest is just standard plumbing that is re-used again and again.

It is acceptable in certain professions to have your influences clearly visible in your work. Painters, fashion designers, architects and composers have all borrowed ideas from their influences to create new work and we never accuse them of plagiarism. Why is it so different with books? If I used a word-processor to cut and paste from 50 books to come up with my own original story, would that be stealing? Yes, you would find similar sentences and phrases but would that take away from the fact that I have created something new?

The fact of the matter is that very little around us is totally new. Its all been done before albeit in a slightly different form.

There is a famous story of an artist who took another artist's painting and created his own work by erasing parts of the original. Would this qualify as new art? Would creating a dish with leftovers from last night qualify as a new dish? Would it make a difference if the leftovers were made by me or were from a restaurant?

I am not condoning passing of somebody else's work as your own. All I am saying is that if you look real closely, almost all new work will have traces of something from the past.

The link below is a YouTube video created by taking clips from other existing videos on YouTube and creating a new piece of music. Take a look!

http://tinyurl.com/c9b4th