self-care.............................

 

Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.

-Albert Camus

We just don't talk like this anymore.....

 

     I cannot appease my melancholly commiseration for our Armies in this furious snow storm in any way so well as by studying your Letter of Oct. 28.

     We are now explicitly agreed, in one important point, vizt.  That "there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents."

     You very justly indulge a little merriment upon this solemn subject of Aristocracy.  I often laugh at it too, for there is nothing in this laughable world more ridiculous that the management of it by almost all of the nations of the Earth.  But while We smile, Mankind have reason to say to Us, as the froggs said to the Boys, What is Sport to you is Wounds and death to Us.  When I consider the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling Cruelty of a majority of those (in all Nations) who are allowed an aristocratical influence; and on the other hand,  the Stupidity with which the more numerous multitude, not only become their Dupes, but even love to be Taken in by their Tricks:  I feel a stronger disposition to weep at their destiny, that to laugh at their folly.

- John Adams, from a letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 15, 1813

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

     

             Ali v Frazier           The Thrilla in Manila

 

hard to tell........................

 

Just because........................

     

            A little bit of musical dance history.............

 

splintered.................

 

     The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereignty and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—'the people' or 'liberty' or 'democracy' or 'progress'.  I'm all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too, but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice.  It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

creators of value..............

 

     Becoming an entrepreneur and starting a business completely changed my life.  Almost everything I had believed about business was proven wrong.  The most important thing I learned in my first year at Safer Way was that business isn't based on exploitations or coercion at all.  Instead, I discovered that business is based on cooperation and voluntary exchange.  People trad voluntarily for mutual gain.  No one is forced to trade with a business.  Customers have competitive alternatives in the marketplace, team members have competitive alternatives for their labor, investors have numerous alternatives to invest their capital, and suppliers have plenty of alternative customers for their products and services.  Investors, labor, management, suppliers—they all need to cooperate to create value for customers.  If they do, the joint value created is divided fairly among the creators of value through competitive market processes based approximately on the overall contribution each stakeholder makes.  In other words, business is not a zero-sum game with a winner and loser.  It is a win, win, win, win game—and I really like that.

-John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business

Misusing the language...............

 

     But did he see himself as ruthless?  Or as a ghoulish fiend?  This is unlikely.  For one thing, the Terror was an old Roman idea: If a roman legion did not do its duty, then indiscriminate punishment would be meted out.  For another, Robespierre preferred to preach virtue as Rousseau, his model, had done.  Virtue, of course, mandated dedication to family, to work, to civic zeal and the dreams of the revolution.  But it also meant getting rid of the enemies of virtue, whoever they were, wherever they were.  From as early as 1789, he trafficked in a world of conspiracy theories, warning about newly minted "patriots," old traitors and hypocrites ("who flatter you today to betray you tomorrow"), and the need for constant purges.  As the revolution wore on, as the gore deepened, as the daily tumbrels bore victims to the guillotine, Robespierre prophesied that for those who refused to adopt virtue, "the Razor of the republic" awaited.  The Terror, he also declared famously, is nothing, nothing "save justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.  It is an emanation of Virtue." . . .

. . . And even as head of the Twelve, he shrank from blood.  It has been duly noted that the only execution he ever attended was his own.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800

gone.......................

 

    Another of our friends of 76 is gone, my dear Sir, another of the Cosigners of the independence of our country.  And a better man, than Rush, could not have left us, more benevolent, more learned, of finer genius, or more honest.  We too must go; and that ere long.  I believe we are under half a dozen at present; I mean the signers of the Declaration.  Yourself, Gerry, Carroll, and myself are all I know to be living. I am the only one South of the Patomac.  Is Robert Treat Payne, or Floyd living?  It is long since I heard of them, and yet I do not recollect to have heard of their deaths.

-Thomas Jefferson, from a May 27, 1813 letter to John Adams

invested...................

 

The more useful a term is for marking my inclusion in a group, the less interested I will be in testing the validity of my use of that term against—well, against any kind of standard.  People who like accusing others of Puritanism have a fairly serious investment, then, in knowing as little as possible about actual Puritanism.  They are invested, for the moment anyway, in not thinking.

-Alan Jacobs, How To Think

Checking in with.......................

 

.......................................Alan Watts:

. . . only doubtful truth needs defense.

. . . to know truth one must first get rid of knowledge . . .

Logic, intelligence, and reason are satisfied, but the heart goes hungry.

Man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more than what he sees—unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp . . .

For it is the essence of scientific honest that you do not pretend to know what you do not know, and of the essence of scientific method that you do not employ hypotheses which cannot be tested.

At once new myths come into being—political and economic myths with extravagant promises of the best of futures in the present world.  These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness.  Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them—for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.

Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.  Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.  Belief clings, but faith lets go.

Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one's own.  But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it.

To "have" running water you must let go of it and let it run.  The same is true of life and of God.

weary..........................

 

     I am weary of contemplating Nations from the lowest and most beastly degradations of human Life, to the highest Refinement of Civilization:  I am weary of Philosophers, Theologians, Politicians, and Historians.  They are immense Masses of Absurdities, Vices and Lies.  Montesquieu had sense enough to say in Jest, that all our Knowledge might be comprehended in twelve Pages in Duodecimo: and, I believe him, in earnest.  I could express my faith in shorter terms.  He who loves the Workman and his Work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of him.

-John Adams, from his June 28, 1812 letter to Thomas Jefferson

oriented....................

 

      When it comes to the purpose of the Socratic method, Socrates had colossal ambitions.  He believed that all of the trouble we have leading our lives, all of our dissatisfactions, all of our failures to progress, all of our moral imperfections, all of the injustices we commit, large and small, stem from one source: ignorance.   Socrates' claim that "I know that I know nothing" isn't an empty gesture of skepticism, but rather a plan for life.  It tells you that the key to success, whether you are navigating difficulties in your marriage, your terror at the prospect of death, or the politicized minefield of social media, is to have the right kind of conversations.  Given that we cannot lead lives based on knowledge—because we lack it—we should lead the second-best kind of life, namely, the one oriented toward knowledge.

-Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Live

Opening paragraphs.....................

When I was a child, I wanted to live in a pine forest.  Or, to be more accurate, a pine plantation.  We have a lot of these in Britain, sown across the hills and mountains during the twentieth century for cheap paper and pulp.  The tight ranks of conifer trees, planted so close together that most of their branches die for lack of light, and which acidify the soil for miles around, are hated by ecologists, landscape lovers and most of the local wildlife, which barely ventures into them.  Perhaps that's what I liked about them.  There seemed to be some kind of dark, mossy mystery in the maze of pillarlike trunks.  Maybe I'd been reading too much Tolkien (this was a perennial problem), but I could imagine myself pitching camp in there, making a small tent of branches and leaves, wandering the soft forest floor, drinking from streams, becoming something other than myself. 

-Paul Kingsnorth, from his Introduction to Against The Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

began to glide....................

 

He went to find a shooting star
Around the bend that's where they are
I went along just for the ride
Suddenly I began to glide

Standing in a slide zone
I could be steppin' through a time zone

The air raced by there was no sound
We drifted high above the ground
And then said you know this place
And then a smile lit up his face

Standing in a slide zone
I could be steppin' in a slide zone . . .

Help me please I thought I said
Then something happened in my head
Music came from all around
And I knew what I had found

-John Lodge, The Moody Blues, Steppin' In A Slide Zone

image via

webs...................

 

It riles them to believe

that you perceive

the web they weave

And keep on thinking free.

-Justin Hayward, The Moody Blues, In The Beginning

We decide......................

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night

Removes the colours from our sight.

Red is grey and yellow white,

But we decide which is right

And which is an illusion.

-Graham Edge, The Moody Blues, Late Lament

Thinking...................

 

And you can fly

High as a kite if you want to

Faster than light if you want to

Speeding through the universe

Thinking is the best way to travel

-Mike Pinder, The Moody Blues, The Best Way to Travel