Thursday, March 19, 2020

One of the more stressful and perhaps more challenging of difficulties Essays

One of the more stressful and perhaps more challenging of difficulties Essays One of the more stressful and perhaps more challenging of difficulties Essay One of the more stressful and perhaps more challenging of difficulties Essay One of the more stressful and perhaps more challenging of difficulties that I face in my everyday life is the language barrier. Being from a non-English speaking country, life becomes much more difficult for me here because of the preconceived notion that all Asians do not speak English very well. While I do not experience the same difficulties when writing in English, the experience is much more difficult when I am interacting and speaking with others because of all the idioms and slang that is used.A perfect example is when I try to interact with people from the support group. What would be a simple matter for some becomes a very difficult task for me. I oftentimes find myself waving my hands trying to explain my point while the others stare idly at me as if I am some kind of crazy person. It is not only stressful but humiliating as well.Another problem that I experience because of this language barrier is the fact that I often find it difficult to find people to talk to just to allow me to de-stress, so to speak. While other stress related problems can easily be addressed by communicating with others, my problem does not provide me with such an alternative and emotionally, such a problem can be very draining. The few times that I do find the confidence to communicate with others also leads to be fruitless because of the biases that certain people have against people of my race and our English speaking abilities.While I am part of a support group that should theoretically allow me to vent my frustration on this matter, this language barrier makes it even m ore difficult and stressful. I understand that the members of the group would like to reach out and help me but the added stress they are exposed to when communicating with me makes it difficult. I cannot simply assume that I am the only one with difficulties and given my shy nature, I would never be the one to impose even if such were the case.It therefore came as a pleasant surprise that I was able to find a person in the group who made it easier for me to gain social support. The conversations were awkward at first as both of us struggled to grasp what the problem of each was. There was a certain uncertainty that followed on how to address the problem. The emotional strings attached made it difficult to tiptoe around the language barrier, initially, but soon enough progress was made.I guess that the reason the exchange went well was because of the mutual respect that we had for one another. Unlike the other people that I previously dealt with, my social support partner tool pains in understanding the handicaps that I was dealing with. Instead of ridiculing me or criticizing me outright, she tried to encourage me to speak up without fear of reprisal or humiliation. I must admit that this made me feel more confident about my problem and in doing so also allowed me to reach out and help with her problem. The wonderful intercourse that we were able to have did a lot to ease the tension. Though we started out as being distant from each other, over time that gap was bridged through steady and effective communication.As mentioned in the tips for the exercise, even the smallest problems can provide stress. I definitely feel that my problem is not that small but I realize that in the grander scheme of things, it probably is. Be that as it may, this experience was very helpful for me. While I may not have tried out my new found and developed confidence in my English speaking skills, I can confidently state that I am one step closer to overcoming my problem.I could ha ve never gained such confidence if it were not for the help of the social support partner. Being in a foreign country can be a very difficult and challenging experience. The new cultures and languages and the fact that I am not as proficient in them as I would like make adjustment very hard. Thanks to my social support partner, however, I have taken a major step toward my stressful problem. I do not think that there is any more that I could ask from the help that was given. The opportunity to be able to reach one to somebody while someone was also able to reach out to me was a wonderful one.

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque

The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque The beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque are three key concepts in aesthetics and philosophy of art. Together, they help to map the variety of aesthetically significant experiences. The differentiation among the three concepts took place in seventeenth and eighteenth hundreds, and is still to these days of some significance, despite the difficulty in pinning down each of the three concepts. The Beautiful The beautiful is a widely employed term, referring typically to aesthetic experiences that are pleasing, while to some extent transcending preferences and needs that are specific to an individual. That is, the experience of something beautiful will please a subject for reasons that reach beyond the subjective inclinations of the subject and that can be experienced also by many - some maintain all - other subjects. It is debated whether the appreciation of beauty rests primarily on a sensory experience of an object of an event, as empiricists maintain, or rather on an appreciation of the object or event that requires understanding, as rationalists maintain. The Sublime The sublime, on the other hand, is a transformative experience typically associated with some negative pleasure and elicited by the encounter of an object or situation whose quantity transcends the limits of our actual grasp. Imagine contemplating the sea, or the sky, an immense quantity of garbage, or a mesmerizing infinite series of numbers: all those experiences can, potentially, elicit the idea of the sublime. To aesthetic theorists of late seventeenth hundreds, the sublime was a crucial concept. By means of it, they explained why it is possible to have aesthetic experiences that are associated with some degree of discomfort or, in the most remarkable cases, to awe. Beauty, they claimed, is nothing like this. In beauty, we do not experience negative feelings and our aesthetic appreciation is not mysteriously associated with that which is experienced. Indeed, the experience of the sublime gives rise to a paradox of the sublime: we find aesthetic reward in having an experience that, at once, we associate with some negative form of pleasure.It has been debated whether the sublime can be elicited by natural objects or by natural phenomena. In mathematics, we encounter the idea of infinity, which may elicit the idea of the sublime. In phantasy or mystery stories we may experience the sublime too, because of what deliberately remains untold. All of those experiences, however, depend on some human craft. But, can nature elicit the idea of the sublime? The Picturesque To make room for a sui generis aesthetic experience of natural objects or phenomena, the category of picturesque was introduced. The picturesque is not indefinite, and yet it allows for some vagueness as to that which elicits the aesthetic response. The view of the Grand Canyon or the view of the ruins of ancient Rome can elicit a picturesque response. We can place some boundaries to that which we are experiencing, and yet the aesthetic worth of the scenery is not attributable to any specific element, which we may term as beautiful.In this three-partition of aesthetic experiences, then, the experience of beauty is the most defined and, perhaps, the most secure. Sublime and Picturesque will be cherished by the adventurous. They are crucial in pinpointing the aesthetic specificity of certain types of literature, music, movies, and visual art.