Joy is in the doing, not in the outcome after the doing.
Do more things you like doing.
-Annie Mueller, from here
Saturday, December 7, 2024
Optionality.................
Don’t get me wrong. America has a lot else going for it, including being protected by two massive oceans on its coasts and two friendly nations to its north and south, vast resources (energy, farmland, and navigable waterways), a diverse population, an educated workforce and entrepreneurial ethos, and the world’s strongest military, economy, and financial markets. However, Americans’ ability to choose how to leverage these assets most effectively is what makes it the most dynamic country and economy in the world.
-Ted Lamade, from here
more closely confined.................
While he was an early advocate for administrative power, Justice William O. Douglas explained that later in life he came to "realize that Congress defaulted when it left it up to an agency to do what the 'public interest' indicated should be done. 'Public interest' is too vague a standard to be left to free-wheeling administrators. They should be more closely confined to specific ends or goals." But that wish, too, seems now a world away. If laws governing major facets of our society were once largely the work of elected representatives and the product of democratic compromises, nowadays they often represent only the current thinking of relatively insulated agency officials in a distant city. It's a result that, as Justice Willliam J. Brennan, Jr., once observed, can post a quandary: "Whereas the colonists challenged the king, today's citizens may find it impossible to know exactly who is responsible."
-Neil Gorsuch, Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law
Friday, December 6, 2024
data.....................
"Are you asking what the point is when it isn't a perfect straight line from goal to achievement?"
I looked at the floor. Yes. That was what I was asking. . . .
"This is the process. The process is what it is even though it doesn't always match our expectations for ourselves or the expectations others put on us. But being real about the process is the way forward. Taking one step forward and then two steps backward is not a calamity. It's the inevitable process."
"So we just expect to fail again and again?"
"Is that so bad?"
"It certainly feels bad." . . .
"Think of it in science terms, not in moral terms. Each of these attempts at the next step is an experiment. It doesn't give us victory or defeat. It gives us data. We need that data. When we reframe from 'success or failure' to 'experiment and data,' we capture the truer sense of what this is."
-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves Us
honest, essential generosity..............
"These steps are not prescriptive, they are descriptive. All of it, relapses included, are just how people change. The process becomes less painful when we honor the honesty of it, when we honor the truth that nonlinear progress is still progress." . . .
"So what does honoring this process mean, then?" . . .
"It means that we don't expect to be perfect. It means when we miss a goal and slip backward, we smile and acknowledge that it isn't a tragedy, that it is the process working as we expected. When we give ourselves that honest, essential generosity, it isn't so painful to try for that next step, because missing isn't a refutation of what we have accomplished or who we are. It is just another experiment. More data." . . .
There is no central wisdom that turns messy human endeavor into easy, linear efficiency.
-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You
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