On beauty........

 

This is why beauty, even today, especially today, cannot serve any party; it cannot serve, in the long or short run, anything but men's suffering or their liberty.  The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains free-lance.  The lesson he then finds in beauty, if he draws it fairly, is a lesson not of selfishness but rather of hard brotherhood.  Looked upon thus, beauty has never enslaved anyone.  And for thousands of years, every day, at every seond, it has instead assuaged the servitude of millions of men and, occasionally, liberated some of them once and for all.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture "Create Dangerously"

Ludwig van....................

 

      Talking with a nice lady on the phone.  She has a case of the midwinter spiritual rot.  And a terminal cold she's had since September 1.

     "Well," rasps she, "you don't ever get depressed, do you?"

     "Listen," says I, "I get lows it takes extension ladders to get out of."

     "So what do you do?" asks she.  "I mean, what DO YOU DO?"

     Nobody ever pinned me down quite like that before.  They usually ask wat I think they should do.

     My solace is not religion or yoga or rum or even deep sleep.  It's Beethoven.  As in Ludwig van.  He's my ace in the hole.  I put his Ninth Symphony on the stereo, pull the earphones down tight, and lie down on the floor.  The music comes on like the first day of creation.

     And I think about old Mr. B.  He knew a whole lot about depression and unhappiness.  He moved around from place to place trying to find the right place.   His was a lousy love life, and he quarreled with his friends all the time.  A rotten nephew worried him deeply—a nephew he really loved.  Mr. B. wanted to be a virtuoso pianist.  He wanted to sing well, too.  But when he was still quite young, he began losing his hearing.  Which is usually bad news for pianists and singers.  By 1818, when he was forty-eight, he was stone-cold deaf.  Which makes it all the more amazing that he finished his Ninth Symphony five years later.  He never really heard it!  He just thought it!

-Robert Fulghum,  All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten

--------------------------------

It may be as impossible to understand the human person by exploring the evolution of the human animal as it is to discover the significance of a Beethoven symphony be tracing the process of its creation.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

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London Symphony Orchestra.....Beethoven's 9th

Ah, experience.................

 

Like all of life’s rich emotional experiences, the full flavor of losing important money cannot be conveyed by literature. You cannot convey to an inexperienced girl what it is truly like to be a wife and mother. There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin by words or pictures. Nor can any description that I might offer here even approximate what it feels like to lose a real chunk of money.

-Fred Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customers' Yachts?: Or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street

A dozen life lessons.............

 

.........................inspired by Ruth Alder Schnee:

6. Pay attention and seek beauty. As Adler Schnee reminds us, “We all make our own environment in which we are comfortable, and beauty is a great part of it.” She also emphasized that finding beauty is much easier than many of us have been led to believe. “You just have to look at things. Everything is designed. My biggest criticism of American education is the schools don’t teach children to look and to see things, because design is all around us. You just have to go outside and look.” 

Hard lessons................

 

      Hippies were so dedicated to living in the moment that preventive maintenance was a difficult lesson for us.  Something breaking was a big event.  Repairing the broken thing is a big event.  But preventing the thing from breaking is a non-event.  Doing a responsible task like changing the oil doesn't come naturally.  It's a messy chore, tedious and thankless.  There's no reward when you do it and no reward later—just the unnoticeable absence of pain.

     To acquire the adult discipline of preventive maintenance, us flower children had to learn at soul depth the remorseless logic of "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." . . .

     Once the pain of avoidable repair is severe and repeated a few times, the attraction of heading off the pain with preventive maintenance becomes compelling.  Then all we need is knowledge of what to do and when and how to do it.

     The universal advice from professional maintainers to every impatient equipment misuser is an expletive: "Read the fucking manual!"  By which they mean: Part of taking proper ownership of something is to study the manual first.

-Steward Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything

Tiny lessons..............

 

Success is creating dramatically more value for the world than you create for yourself.

-Vlad Tenev

Parrish & Housel, Part 1.............

 

Parrish & Housel, part 2

 

21............................

 

.....................................tiny lessons:

7.  What you refuse to do matters more than what you do.

8. The best ideas don’t come from headquarters. They come from people close to the problem.

9. Leverage comes from being willing to walk away.

Timeless lessons...............

 

.................shared by Ben Carlson:

Market volatility is an opportunity, not a reason to abandon your investment plan.

Don’t allow fear or greed to dictate your investment stance.

Don’t confuse your investment time horizon with someone else’s.

Don’t give in to FOMO.

Don’t allow recency bias, survivorship bias, hindsight bias, or short-term performance to guide your actions.

Never panic.

Never get too high in a bull market or too low in a bear market. You’re not smarter when the market goes up or dumber when it goes down.

Markets are constantly evolving. Human nature is not. The narratives are driven by price and price movements are fickle.

It’s always the same lessons!

Unfortunately................

 

One of the great lessons of the past decade is that when you read a variation of “experts say” in a headline, you ought to think twice and for yourself.

-from this episode of The Free Press

Seven learnings ......................................

.............from a week spent with legends: 

1. Intuition is earned.

2. You’re judged by your peaks, not your sums.

3. We need to look back more often.

 4. Most people don’t know what they want.

5. Stop doubling down on a losing hand.

6. Vulnerability is contagious (and breeds strength).

7. Maybe you can have it all.

-Sahil Bloom, extrapolated from this post

the moral.....................

 

What matters is the moral.  If you got everything else wrong from The Odyssey, but you left understanding the importance of perseverance, the dangers of hubris, the risks of temptation and distraction, then you really learned something.

-Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic

On the importance..............

 

................of telling our younger selves stories:

I still get emotional reading these scenes. The whole point of the classic adventure novel is that, when the time comes, the protagonist discovers his inner strength; and as the reader, we get to soar with him.

Life its ownself.....................

 

      I started staying after practice just to work on rebounding.  In many ways, this approach to finding a unique path wasn't just about basketball; it was about life.  It was about understanding that true success doesn't come from following the crowd, but from daring to be different, to see opportunities where others see obstacles.  It was a lesson that would serve me well beyond the court.

-George Raveling, What You're Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports

the quiet moments....................

 

    Why me?

    Why was I spared when so many others weren't?

    Why was I gifted with this extra time?

    And what do I do with this gift?

    This kind of introspection isn't merely a luxury of age, it's a necessity, a way to reconcile the randomness of existence with the purpose I sought.  I realized that the answers weren't in the grand events, but in the quiet moments, in the decisions made when no one was watching, in the way I chose to face each new day.

-George Raveling, What You're Made For: Powerful Life Lessons from My Career in Sports

I've cut more than my share.............

In the school of life, every experience offers a lesson. . . .

Some people fully embrace learning, while others choose to cut class.

-Frank Sonnenberg

teachings...........................

 The worst lesson that can be taught a man is to rely upon others and to whine over his sufferings. . . .

It is both foolish and wicked to teach the average man who is not well off that some wrong or injustice has been done him, and that he should hope for redress elsewhere than in his own industry, honesty and intelligence.

-Teddy Roosevelt, from this 1897 essay

randomness...............

 

You'll be living a lesson that everyone should learn.  Random stuff happens.  All you can control is your response.  Every day, you'll practice how to react to chaos: with dignity, poise, and grace.

-Derek Sivers:  How To Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion

louder please........................

 Read me a lesson, Muse, and speak it loud

-John Keats, channeled here