Nielson-Visual Studies Book Final Copy

There’s a saying that says it’s about journey, not the destination. I believe this saying is all about endurance. To endure the path to victory is in itself a victory. David Blaine talks about his journey to holding his breath for 17 minutes while underwater and his story shows that it’s not just about achieving a goal but knowing how to endure the many small failures that come with it.
Endurance is a necessity to get through life. Whether it’s to make it to the end of high school or college, or enduring being unemployed, it’s a skill that is required over and over again throughout our lifetimes. Endurance, to me, is about mental strength. Whatever life throws our way will require a response. Endurance is a response. A person will endure the challenge and get through it or they will back away and give up.
Giving up or to stop caring might be considered easier than enduring, but every path in life will eventually have a bump in it and to continue moving forward endurance is required. David Blaine talked about his failures in his TED talk. He talked about failing to hold his breath past 6 minutes on national television and how he trying to find different ways to get around actually having to hold his breath.
David Blaine tried to do the stunt the “easy” way. He tried to take the challenge and the work out of it but after hitting several dead-ends, he finally accepted that he would have to actually do the work and practice holding his breath. This began a whole new set of challenges for him to endure through. He practiced and utilized different tools to help him and he eventually did it. He endured through hard work and pain and suffering to achieve his goal. David Blaine did one of the hardest things to do and that is enduring through hardship and challenges.
The lesson to be learned here is that even though it’s hard, enduring though challenges will make the victory even sweeter. I believe the true measure of a person is how they react to a hard situation. Some will give up and run away, but the ones that fight through to the end and never give up, are the strongest people.

Time, as we know it, is probably one of the most complex ideas for the human mind to process and conceive. We try to visualize and make sense out of an idea that has no real form. We have given time a form so that our brains can comprehend the idea of time. As a visual person, I picture units of time in certain orders and shapes that would be hard to explain without drawing a picture. But the basic structure of time has come down to the past, present, and future.
David McDermott, the Dublin artist, tries to live as if the present never happened. Personally, I do not think any of us live in the present. Everyone is either remembering the good old times of the past or they are looking to the future for better times to come. Whether it’s through trendy vintage clothing or trying to be ahead of the curve on the latest music, clothes, or technology, there is rarely a person found, if found at all, who is happy with what they have and not occupying their thoughts on the past or future.
David also believed that every moment lasted forever and that all moments are “existing” all at once. If time is not actually moving forward then why do we display it as if it was? What confuses me is that if time is not technically moving forward then why do we get older as “time” goes on? Do we not really get older, but our consciousness is moving from one version of ourselves to another?
This idea that there are parallel universes of ourselves also confuses me. Some people claim that this version of time gives us at least a small semblance of choice. But does it really? How do know that we are destined to make the choice that took us to that specific universe? Which decisions does the “universe picking” start with? Does this start with our first decision or does it begin at birth with the decisions our parents make for us? Or maybe this is just another theory that someone has come up with to try to comprehend how time works.
Time is one subject that makes my brain hurt. I do not pretend to understand it and I highly doubt I ever will actually understand it. It’s a subject that piques the curiosity of many people. Not only does it confound the everyday person, but scientists, such as Albert Einstein, seem to take it as a personal challenge to find the truth about time.