Saturday, February 13, 2021

Join...................

       Join with all those who experiment, take risks, fall, get hurt, and then take more risks.  Stay away from those who affirm truths, who criticize those who do not think like them, people who have never once taken a step unless they were sure they would be respected for doing so, and those who prefer certainties to doubts.

     Join with those who are open and not afraid to be vulnerable:  they understand that people can improve only once they start looking at what their fellows are doing, not in order to judge them, but to admire them for their dedication and courage

-Paul Coelho, The Archer

Election fraud......................

 I am certain that voting shenanigans went on in the most recent election.  Did it determine the outcome?  Maybe, maybe not.  Regardless, students of America will know that what occurred in 2020 was child's play in the context of our history.  To wit:

Already, some two generations out of slavery, when statistically they had been three-fifths of a person, "Negroes" conducted an unrequited love affair with the republic that had, reluctantly at best, freed them in 1863.  They fought in U.S. wars and paid taxes.  They rendered cheap labor on railroads and docks, in factories, private kitchens, and cotton fields.  Although fulfilling the obligations of citizenship, Negroes were systematically denied the benefits.  White supremacy was certified and enforced as national policy by the full force of the Supreme Court, Congress, and the executive branch of the federal government, although in wholly different ways.  The Court's 1896  Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" ruling was a sham decision that froze in place an impregnable caste structure under legalized segregation.  Negroes were repressed as a permanent underclass and were flagrantly denied equal access to housing, jobs, education, public accommodations, due process in the courts, and despite, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the guaranteed right to vote.  Even when American women were granted the vote in 1920, Negroes across gender lines were largely denied the franchise, especially in the South, where some 80 percent of them lived.

-Les Payne, The Dead Are Arising:  The Life of Malcolm X

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

In the background........................................

 Renaissance..............................Scheherazade and other stories













                   music here

Now that you mention it.....................................

 .................................. a glass of wine would be nice.

It's a possibility......................

 A curious paradox characteristic of every kind of courage here confronts us.  It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.  This dialectic relationship between conviction and doubt is characteristic of the highest types of courage . . .

     People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one are dangerous.  Such conviction is the essence not only of dogmatism, but of its more destructive cousin, fanaticism.  It blocks off the user from learning new truth, and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt.  The person then has to double his or her protests to quiet not only the opposition but his or her own unconscious doubts as well. . . .

. . . The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one.  Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt.  To believe fully and and the same time to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment.  To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis.  Truth is thus a never-dying process.  We then know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz: "I would walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something."

-Rollo May,  The Courage To Create


Why enabling How...............................

      I remember two cases of would-be suicide, which bore a striking similarity to each other.  Both men had talked of their intention to commit suicide.  Both used the typical argument—they had nothing more to expect from life.  In both cases, it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.  We found, in fact, that for the one it was his child whom he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign country.  For the other it was a thing, not a person.  This man was a scientist and had written a series of books which still needed to be finished.  His work could not be done by anyone else, anymore that another person could ever take the place of the father in the child's affections.

      This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love.  When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude.  A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life,  He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any  "how."

-Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning

thanks Michael

Focusing on the chronic...........................

 . . . as we strap into a rollercoaster of external change, we forget to work on the problems we have the opportunity to improve.

-Seth Godin, from this post

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

The Art of Accepting..................

 The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has done you a small favor wish that he might have done a greater one.

Never accept flattery as though it were a compliment, and never accept a compliment as though it were a flattery.

The only graceful way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved.

Always accept defeat as though it were defeat and success as though it were success, but never take either for granted; neither is permanent.

But if the art of accepting is, as I have suggested, the art of gratifying those who would be generous to you, "Thank you" has no peer.

-Russell Lynes, a few snippets culled from this essay contained in this book

Start...........................

 Artists begin without being asked.  That is the acid test of agency: not just having ideas, but acting on them.  Where experimenters may carefully calculate need, passion, and resources, artists supply all three themselves.  The need and passion are internally generated.  The resources are ideas and time, but time is not infinite.  So choosing one subject means abandoning the rest, with no guarantee that the choice is right.  The only way to find out is to start.  Almost every artist describes their way of working as a curious combination of invention, which is conscious, and discovery, which is not. 

-Margaret Heffernan,  Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

On questions and answers...............

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books that are written
in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers,
which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day
into the answer.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Alone..................................

 Unlike today, when people tailor even their most intimate moments for consumption on social media, Eisenhower believed that the task of overcoming any challenge must be a personal matter—a burden to be borne alone.

-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led:  The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions

Fifty years ago...............................

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.....................................Mr. Bojangles

 

Monday, February 8, 2021

Here's one risk I am willing to run.........

 ..................................................."longevity risk."

via

But till that morning..............................

Janis Joplin........................................................Summertime

 

Responsibilities..............................

 It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.  The answer to big government is not private freedom, but private responsibility.

-Wendell Berry

Undaunted........................

      If artists have the capacity to make work that defies time, it is because instead of trying to force-fit a predetermined idea of the future, they have learned to live productively with ambiguity, to see it as a rich source of discovery and exploration.  Instead of trying to reduce complexity, they mine it, undaunted by contradictions and paradoxes. . . . In this, artists have much to teach us about how we ourselves could address the future with imagination and independence.  In addition to thinking about what to do, the artist's method suggest that we should think about how to be.

-Margaret Heffernan,  Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

Yep.............................

 ..............................................................a lot of people are.

Just a head's up......................................

 If you’re not paying, you’re the product, not the customer. And sometimes, even if you are paying, the long-term impact of your quest for convenience might not be what you were hoping for.

-Seth Godin, from here

Apparently there is a lot of anger out there.......



    via

VDH revisits..............................................

..........................................Animal Farm:

 Beware, he warns, of the powerful who claim to help the helpless.

Much truth here................................

 


One impossible.................................

 ........................................................................question.

Sunday, February 7, 2021

Fifty years ago........................

Jethro Tull...........................My God from the Aqualung album

 

Lead me.........................



Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace

-The Upanishads

      via

On lurching..........................

 In Gettysburg I still feel close to my grandparents, and I still go to these rolling hills for reflection.  Yet so much has changed since that time—not just the disappearance of the Stuckey's souvenir shops or the Rexall drugstore on Gettysburg's main square—the fabric of our society today has a different texture than it did in the 1950s:  some of it stronger but much of it badly frayed.

      Engaging one's deepest self was easier in those days—with long waits between letters and long-distance phone calls deferred until Sunday when the rates were cheaper.  Today, tethered to smartphones and transfixed by Twitter and Instagram, we lurch from one demand to another with scarcely a moment to think.  Our impulses are reactive, not considered.  They are short-term rather than strategic.  We have lost our capacity to act in the present while thinking into the future.  We are struggling.

-Susan Eisenhower, from her Introduction to How Ike Led:  The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions

Conversation starters (or maybe stoppers)..............

 .............100 more questions that don't get asked.

Important questions............................

 ........................nobody is asking:

Why aren't there any left-handed catchers in the Major Leagues?

via

In the background.........................

 


Generosity of spirit...............

 The most important thing is love of others.  Not necessarily a sugary, let's-all sing-'We-Are-The-World' kind of love, but a stable, meaningful generosity of spirit that enables us to do things for others—those we know and those we don't—because at base level we choose to give of ourselves. . . . So here's my working definition of generosity of spirit:  It is the commitment to treat a person with dignity and kindness regardless of how you feel about him or her.

-Mark Sanborn,  The Fred Factor

Look.............................

 Look beneath the surface:  never let a thing's intrinsic quality or worth escape you.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6:3

this huge and unparalleled modern wrong........

 My forthcoming work in five volumes, `The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,' is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful whether I shall live to finish it.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, as he begins this short essay

Bezos..........................

      The initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, who invested a large fraction of their life savings in something they didn't understand.  They weren't making a bet on Amazon or the concept of a bookstore on the internet.  They were making a bet on their son.  I told them I thought there was a 70 percent chance they would lose their investment, and they did it anyway.  It took more than fifty meetings for me to raise $1 million from investors, and over the course of all those meetings, the most common question was, "What's the internet?"

      Unlike many other countries around the world, this great nation we live in supports and does not stigmatize entrepreneurial risk-taking.  I walked away from a steady job into a Seattle garage to found my startup, fully understanding it might not work.  It feels like just yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself, dreaming that one day we might be able to afford a forklift.

      Amazon's success was anything but preordained.  Investing in Amazon early on was a very risky proposition.  From our founding through the end of 2001, our business had accumulated losses of nearly $3 billion, and we did not have a profitable quarter until the fourth quarter of that year.  Smart analysts predicted Barnes & Noble would steamroll us, and branded us "Amazon.toast."  In 1999, after we'd been in business for nearly five years, Barron's headlined a story about our impending demise "Amazon.bomb."  My annual shareholder letter for 2000 started with a one-word sentence" "Ouch."

-Jeff Bezos, Invent & Wander:  The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos