As people every day we go through life working through the struggles and growing as individuals. When you apply the concept of struggles to literature, we can connect it to a seed shape. This seed shape is the concept of order → disorder → reorder. This concept shows how people have a life before a struggle, go through the struggle, and then come together as a changed person who has overcome the struggle. This seed shape applies to almost everything in life. A movie, a conversation, a song, a book, or even a day-to-day experience. This seed shape involves recursion. It is something that occurs every day over and over again. It can be going to the bathroom and finding out that there is no toilet paper on the roll, or making a mistake in life and pushing through the battles to overcome it. But on a deeper scale, it can relate to one’s education. When we are children we have fresh minds, and we are influenced by those around us, especially our immediate family. When it comes to family and our developing brains we can be influenced by something as deep as a political standpoint, or a view on the outside world.
When children partake in everyday life they have a sense of order. Things like when dinner is ready every day, or when they have chores. These aspects of life help to shape their seed into who they are today.
Alice Walker writes in Call and Response an expert titled, Everyday Use. In this piece, Walker invites the audience into the life of a young African American child and her mother. Describing the relationship between mother and daughter and the struggles of the time. Being African American during this time comes with its struggles, the time when African Americans and White people do not see eye to eye when the world is filled with hate. “Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye?” (Walker 1797). This is the order of her life. This is when looking scared into a white man’s eye was the “normal.” Not only is this issue applicable to the mother but it also is to the daughter. A child growing up with an order of life where being scared was part of growing up, being different and not fitting in was part of growing up, and working during the day was part of growing up. This was part of her premature life, her “normal,” her order.
Until this child grows and learns more from the struggles of reality she will stay in a constant state of order.
As a child develops the order will change and become disrupted, this will cause a disorder in the once-organized way of living. This is something that people go through as they come of age, as they are exposed to and understand the true struggles of life. As time moves on and we learn about the harsh realities we try our best to learn and adapt. But learning can be a struggle. Not only can learning be a struggle but so can teaching. When a person or student has grown their whole lives in a sense of order, it is hard to open their mind to new ideas and concepts. A child or teen who comes from a home where things are taught in a certain manner, or they are encouraged to perceive people in a certain way. As children grow and their minds expand then they are truly faced with the harsh truths of the world. These harsh truths disrupt their once-ordered minds.
If there was a student, a white male student. Those who come from an order at the home of white supremacy, and are suddenly exposed to the truths of America’s foundation, or history, it would disrupt their order of life.
In Barkley Brown’s essay, “African-American Women’s Quilting” she opens the audience to the world of teaching Black women’s history in the ideals that are consistent with Black women’s understanding of that history. When teaching a classroom full of students of different races and backgrounds, including students who have grown up in Western norms, it can be challenging for the teacher but eye-opening for the student. “ I do not mean that white or male students can learn to feel what it is like to be a Black woman. Rather, I believe that all people that can learn to center in another experience, validate it, and judge it by its own standards without need of comparison or need to adopt that framework as their own” (Brown 922). Students who have yet to be exposed to these truths or the true history of people from different backgrounds will learn new views. Although the students do not have to necessarily agree or believe the things being taught to them, it will still cause a disorder in the order they once believed in. Their “normal” and the order they have grown around, been influenced by, and constantly exposed to will become altered, and for some ultimately change for the better.
As things change and time goes by, people in everyday life learn new things, discover new things, and challenge themselves to new levels, causing their order to be disrupted. But in the end, the order will be restored. When this order is restored, it doesn’t mean that the person had to like the change or change with it, but they will ultimately come out a different person or a new person. This concept can also be applied to things we do as a society. Something that was discussed in class was the difference in time periods. One of the things that I brought up was telephones. As a society decades ago there were no phones. Then as time went on and discoveries were made and technology was improved, cell phones were invented. As we know time never stops and neither did the advancements of this technology. The cell phone that we have today was once a rotary phone. But the advancements developed and things were changed causing the once order to be disrupted. Although the disruption was not drastic enough to the point where we don’t have any phones at all it was still fondled with. Now in today’s society, we still have phones, and there is order. But due to the disorder the phones have advanced technology, there is a difference in how they were decades ago.
I think that this seed shape will recur until the end of time. The struggles of life are inevitable, all we can do is learn and reorder our lives. Do you think there are serious times in your life when this seed shape has been applied? What about the silliest little things that this seed shape can be applied to? What about when you go to the dining hall for soup and there is no soup left, so instead you get fries? You had an order going into the dining hall, then the order was disrupted, but in the end, you ultimately restored this order, but changed along the way. Things don’t always have to work out in the end, but it is part of life and we can keep on going no matter what life throws at us.