Paradise and Death The Temptations of Odyssey by Eric MacKnight had me thinking about modern concerns in the world revolving around temptations. This essay summarizes the parts of the book that we have read with detail and it was very helpful to get over the plot of the story. It was easy to follow along and carried out its own observations on the topics like: drugs, living in the past, self-awareness/consciousness; which I believe are so important to our society as to this moment. Today we live in a world filled with information. We are surrounded by so much that we don’t often realize how much we are consuming; our brain understands that it cannot process this much, and it results in binging. Feeling stressed, anxious and burned out, it is very hard to complete daily tasks without a struggle. Even getting homework done right after school after a long day, seems impossible. So instead you go on your phone and get lost in the endless scrolling, thinking it will take a couple of moments before you feel ready and more energized. But we never do, we become aware when we check the time to see that more than 20 mins has passed since, unlike your routine that needs catching up. It is so tempting to get back to scrolling, the short lasting satisfaction with a long term consequence.. Just like any other drug. Whether it is the Lotos, or the Kyklops, we need to be more like Odysseus; always think about the aftermath and distract yourself from the temptation, and replace (scrolling for example) with a better activity, like mindfulness and yoga.
Thinking about how we could have made a better choice, we can easily get caught up in even more unpleasant emotions. We often tend to come back to our memories, and relive them, finding comfort and peace in the past. This is because we lack these emotions in the present, we miss the “good old days” back when everything seemed so “right” and we never valued these moments enough, until all we can do is remember. But we need to question ourselves: why aren’t we with these people anymore? They sure would be in your life today, right? Everything happens for a reason. We need to start living in the present. Creating (new) memories, making those special moments ourselves, letting ourselves be happy in the moment.
-“It is what it is, it was what it was, it will be what it will be”
Reading the 18 page essay, I was amazed by the structure of the writing. Managing to include so much detail and not repeat the same points over and over is something I am looking forward to achieving when writing my own work. I also learned that not every “sentence” has to have a proving point/evidence with the quotations from the text. Some things are so well explained, that the quotations would not be necessary. The essay included the numbers of the pages, and did not have line numbers, which I will take in notice as well.