I used to find the Amazon logo faintly - unsettling? Annoying? I couldn't understand why the arrow that swoops under the word Amazon didn't go from one end of the word to the other other. It looked incomplete to me, not well thought out. But of course it had been well thought out; someone paid someone else a lot of money to come up with that logo. I would ask people what they thought about it and they would usually either shrug or say "It's a smile", but that didn't satisfy me.
I can still remember the moment when I realized that the arrow started at the A in Amazon and ended on the Z. That logo is subtly implying that Amazon has everything from A to Z. I've never heard that mentioned in any of their adverts, and I haven't met anyone else who has come to that conclusion, but to me it seems quite clear.
That was one of those moments when I felt I had had an original thought, one not prompted by anyone else's suggestion but which I truly came up with myself.
There haven't been many moments of pure insight like that in my life, but another that stands out to me was when I solved a koan to my own satisfaction. A koan is defined as "a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment." One of the most famous is this:
If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?
I've never come up with a satisfying answer for that one. However, I have what I feel is a perfect answer for the question:
Is the glass half empty or half full?
Most people use that question to determine if a person is an optimist (half full) or pessimist (half empty), as in "She's a half-empty glass kind of person." But I realized one day, one moment, that the glass is always completely full. Even if it's only half full of water or whatever, it's still completely full because the rest of the space is filled with air.
I love that answer because it's such a great way to live, such a nourishing way to think of things. Even if there is not what I want nor expect from a situation, the situation still contains a lot, and can I let go of what I expected and deal with what is actually present? Every situation, every moment, is always completely full; just not always full of what I want. I'm an all-full glass kind of person, or do my best to be.
