Chelsea Ottaviani- Landscapes of the Sacred repsonse to Symbolism

In class today we discussed the signifigance and importance of symbols in the human culture. I never thought about how heavily we as a race relied on symbols before we broke down the idea in class. We rely on symbols to hold together friendships, to keep memories, to share thoughts with our families, to do well in school....everything we do revolves around symbols. Before this class I had no realization that we depended on symbols, but after the discussion it makes so much sense to me. Nothing we share with one another is the actual encounter- it is all a memory, a symbol of our experience. No matter what we do or what we say we cannot share the encounter in full, we can only share the symbol that we have made to remember our experience. When I break it down even further, there are so many other symbols that we rely on. Our language and how we communicate is just a symbol of feelings and ideas we are trying to get across. The way we use body language is a symbol or ideas as well. We have street signs with pictures to symbolize rules of the road. We celebrate days that symbolize days of the past, like our birthdays and christmas. Everything in our world is based on symbols and it wasnt until now that I realized this.