Color me doubtful.....................

     For similar reasons, secular education does not mean a negative indoctrination that teaches kids not to believe in God and not to take part in any religious ceremonies.  Rather, secular education teaches children to distinguish truth from belief, to develop compassion for all suffering beings, to appreciated the wisdom and experience of all the earth's denizens, to think freely without fearing the unknown, and to take responsibility for their actions and for the world as a whole.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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

The Beatles.........................................................Revolution 1

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

Bt when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out
Don't you know it's gonna be 
All right, all right, all right

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We're doing what we can

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait
Don't you know it's gonna be 
All right, all right, all right

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead

But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow
Don't you know it's gonna be 
All right, all right, all right
All right, all right, all right
All right, all right, all right
All right, all right

Can't tell if this is good or bad.................

".... has the self-awareness of a sea sponge soaked in cask-strength bourbon.”


- via

Subtraction................................

"In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what's really important to them."

-Austin Kleon,  Steal Like An Artist:  10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

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

The Beatles..................................................Mother Nature's Son

A pretty low bar...............................

        via

On point in time data.................

One of the reasons the fire-hose of information can actually make it harder to analyze the state of the world is because many people simply use point in time data instead of taking time to look at the overall trend.

Current data tells you very little unless you’re able to provide context about where it’s been and where it’s potentially going next.

-Ben Carlson, as lifted from here

The echoes of history...................

     Nevertheless, that burden of past glory loomed over Alcibiades' age group just as the accomplishments of  the "greatest generation" of World War II do our own, especially when men like his guardian Pericles constantly harangued younger Athenians about their imperial burdens.  Spartans also fled similar apprehensions about becoming soft in comparison to their roughneck Lacedaemonian granddads who had died blocking the pass at Thermopylae.  thus, the Corinthians remonstrated with the Peloponnesians on the eve of the battle:  "It is not a just thing that all that was won through poverty should be destroyed through prosperity."

-Victor Davis Hanson,  A War Like No Other:  How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

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

The Beatles..............from Yellow Submarine:  All Together Now

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

The house, on the northeast corner of Opdyke Road and Woodward Avenue, was unlike any other.  The giant old mansion, nearly seventy years old, stood lovely and lopsided in its asymmetrical design, with its roofs and lofts of varying heights and chimneys that reached into the sky.   Here in Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy northern suburb of Detroit where top executives of the automobile industry spent their evenings and weekends in rustic comfort with their wives, children, and servants, the unusual dwelling was more home than a family needed.  It sat on a country estate that spanned some thirty acres of former farmland, with a gatehouse, gardens, barns, and a spacious garage that could hold more than two dozen cars.  It even had its own name, Stonycroft, a harsh and daunting moniker for a tranquil, out-of-the-way setting.   There were few neighbors for miles around and no distractions to disturb its residents from their serenity, aside from the occasional slicing at golf balls that could be heard from a nearby country club.  More often, the chilly residence echoed with its own emptiness while its current tenants left many of its forty rooms mostly unoccupied, unheated, and unused.  But on its highest floor, spanning the vast width of the house, was an attic.   And in the attic was a boy.

-Dave Itzkoff,   Robin

Let's all take good care........................

.................................of the Goose that lays the golden eggs:

A dynamic chart of the Top 10 Gross Domestic Products since 1961


via

Gladly............................

21.  If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change.  I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody.  It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations, from Book Six

Nature..............................

"Nature helps every man to the gratification of the thoughts which he most encourages, and opportunities are presented which will most speedily bring to the surface both the good and evil thoughts."

-James Allen,   As A Man Thinketh

Privilege..........................

"Is it then too much to assert or is it too uncharitable to suppose, that a man who has injured you in your Bread would also injure you in your life, if he thought he could do it with legal impunity."
     Jacob was well aware that his older brother, while brilliant, had emotional blind spots.  Benjamin, he knew, had no real idea what men of privilege were capable of doing to keep that privilege.

-Stephen Fried,  Rush:  Revolution, Madness & The Visionary Doctor Who Became A Founding Father

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

The Beatles................................................Long, Long, Long

I wondered.......................

................................what had happened to all the statesmen.

There had been relative peace across the Continent continuously since 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic Wars), with irruptions of violence successively contained by the machinations of the old aristocratic order. But as the lordly whig Asquith said, as the clouds gathered in 1914, suddenly he felt trapped in a lunatic asylum. He was referring specifically to the extraordinary power of manipulated mass movements, which restricted the diplomacy of the statesmen, and compelled them to persist on courses they knew to be unwise and potentially catastrophic, under the impulse of national (as opposed to personal) “honour.” To do otherwise would mean losing power themselves — to be trampled under the mob, as it were — which was of course unthinkable to them. For they were no longer statesmen, but had become politicians.

-David Warren, as extracted from this post

Lots of gratitude.........................

thanks Jess

I'm usually asleep before...............

........the Late Show starts, but this is certainly watchable:



    via

On talent.................................

"If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room."

-Austin Kleon

Use it, or lose it............................

When was the last time you committed something to memory?  Now that we have 4G phones we don't need to remember anything, really, yet we're also aware this is a small disaster.  Our short- and long-term memories suffer for it.
     Merely doing what one has always done, such as a specialist does, strengthens existing networks but builds no new ones in the brain.  It also means that short- and medium-term memory are used less and less.  The lesson - an intuitive one only recently supported by scientific research - is simple:  if you do not use your memory, it will atrophy.   If you don't visit new places where you are required to orientate yourself by, for example, learning where shops are, finding the way back to your hotel, ore even remembering where you parked your car, then you'll gradually lose even this basic skill.  And it does help to think of memory as a skill.

-Robert Twigger,  micro mastery:  Learn Small, Learn Fast, and Unlock Your Potential to Achieve Anything

Fluidity............................

In Plutarch's Life of Theseus, he describes how the ship of Theseus, an Athenian hero, was preserved by the people of Athens in battle-ready condition for many centuries.  Each time a board decayed, it would be replaced until eventually every stick of wood in it had been replaced.  Plutarch asks:  Is it still the ship of Theseus, or it it now a new one? ...
     Our understanding of what is is just a snapshot - an ephemeral opinion.  The universe is in a constant state of change.  Our nails grow and are cut and keep growing.  New skin replaces dead skin.  Old memories are replaced by new memories.  Are we still the same people?  Are the people around us the same?  Nothing is exempt from this fluidity, not even the things we hold most sacred.

-Ryan Holiday,  from this day's entry in The Daily Stoic

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

The Beatles...............................................The Fool On The Hill

As we used to say.................

.............................back at the fraternity house, "all things in moderation - including moderation."

I have abandoned that libertarian project, however, because I have come to abandon ideology. This essay is an invitation for you to do likewise — to walk out of the “clean and well-lit prison of one idea.” Ideology encourages dodgy reasoning due to what psychologists call “motivated cognition,” which is the act of deciding what you want to believe and using your reasoning power, with all its might, to get you there. Worse, it encourages fanaticism, disregard for social outcomes, and invites irresolvable philosophical disputes. It also threatens social pluralism — which is to say, it threatens freedom.

The better alternative is not moral relativism. The better alternative is moderation, a commodity that is rapidly disappearing in political life, with dangerous consequences for the American republic.

-Jerry Taylor, from his essay The Alternative to Ideology

via

Tonight was (is) pizza night................

      via

awkward mold...........................

As for our celebrated lawgivers, who have cast us in our present awkward mold, you may be sure that they have acted to serve their interests and not ours. Witness all our political, civil, and religious institutions — examine them thoroughly: unless I am very much mistaken, you will see how, through the ages, the human race has been broken to the halter that a handful of rascals were itching to impose. Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

-Denis Diderot in 1796

Titles.................................

     Through the Dillys he also connected with the radical politician John Wilkes, who was in prison at King's Bench, where he had been remanded after being expelled from the House of Commons for his views.  Rush visited him in prison, for a dinner party attended by more than a dozen of Wilkes's friends in his two-room cell (which included its own library).  Rush was impressed that Wilkes was "an enthusiast for AMERICAN Liberty" and was intrigued by his advice about the need to build a new nation that challenged class distinctions.  "If you can but preserve an equality among one another,"  Wilkes told him, "you will always be free in spite of everything.  Titles are the bane of an infant country."

-Stephen Fried,  Rush:  Revolution, Madness & The Visionary Doctor Who Became A Founding Father

in liberty alone...................

"From infancy I was taught to love humanity and liberty.  Inquiry and experience have since confirmed by reverence for the lessons then given me, by convincing me more fully of their truth and excellence.  Benevolence towards mankind excites wishes for their welfare, and such wished endear the means of fulfilling them.  Those can be found in liberty alone, and therefore her sacred cause ought  to be espoused by every man, on every occasion, to the utmost of his power."

-John Dickinson, from Letters from a Farmer, Letter 1.  Circa 1767

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

The Beatles.....................................Happiness Is A Warm Gun

Pondering this......................

the high ground.............................

Management prefers peace over justice.   Firing off harsh memos will not score points and refusing to cooperate with a co-worker can be a ticket to oblivion.
     People who act like spoiled stars are more likely to be regarded as spoiled than catered to as stars.  As political speechwriter Vic Gold once put it, "The squeaky wheel is sometimes replaced."  The wisest strategy in any workplace dispute is to seize the high ground by being as reasonable as possible.
     Let the other person play prima donna.  You may have some short-term losses but you'll gain over the long term, especially as a person.  To paraphrase an old joke, you don't want to win the rat race if it means becoming a rat.

-Michael Wade,  All I Said Was:  What Every Supervisor, Employee, and Team Should Know to Avoid Insults, Lawsuits, and the Six O'Clock News

Not sure this yet has been decided.....

     In many of the medical texts Rush was reading, there was  basic debate about the role of the physician.  Was it primarily to help nature take its course, or was the purpose of physic for the doctor to try to wrestle nature to the ground, to be its master, not its servant?

-Stephen Fried, Rush:  Revolution, Madness & The Visionary Doctor Who Became A Founding Father

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

The Beatles..............................................................Glass Onion



Here's another clue for you all,  the walrus was Paul

Measure..................................

     Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.  Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits.  Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits.  Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits.  You get what you repeat.


-James Clear,  Atomic Habits:  Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

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

The Beatles....................................................I Am The Walrus

Can I get an Amen.......................?

 "freedom and democracy depend on our disinhibition; we need to be able to laugh at authority." 

-Ann Althouse, from here

Civic responsibility fulfilled..............

Counting on this being true........

"Twelve years from now, your future self is going to thank you for something you did today, for an asset you began to build, a habit you formed, a seed you planted."

-Seth Godin, from here

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

The Beatles......................................................Don't Pass Me By

Time......................................

“As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.”


-Haruki Murakami

via

Useful..............................

     Invoking the story of David, Davies implored his students to "imbibe and cherish a public spirit.  Serve your generation.  Live not for your selves, but the public.  Be the servants of the Church;  the servants of your Country;  the servants of all."  He exhorted them to "esteem yourselves" not but how much "more happy, honourable and important" you can become but by how much "more useful you are!"

-Stephen Fried,  Rush:  Revolution, Madness & The Visionary Doctor Who Became A Founding Father, as he channels the Reverend Samuel Davies in his 1760 address to the graduating class of eleven at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton).

When tomorrow is today..............

Max Frost and The Troopers....The Shape of Things to Come



There's a new sun rising up angry in the sky
There's a new voice crying but not afraid to die

Let the old world make believe it's blind and deaf and dumb
But nothing can change the shape of things to come

There are changes lying ahead on every road
There are new thoughts ready and waiting to explode
When tomorrow is today, the bells will toll for some
But nothing can change the shape of things to come

The future's coming on sweet and strong
And no-one's gonna hold it back for long

There are new dreams crowding out old realities
There's revolution sweeping in like a fresh new breeze
Let the old world make believe it's blind and deaf and dumb
But nothing can change the shape of things 
Nothing can change the shape of things 
Nothing can change the shape of things
Nothing can change the shape of things
To come

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

The Beatles.......................................................Hello, Goodbye

Featherbeds.................................

"People seem to want the government to create a giant featherbed for them, so they don’t have to worry about anything at all."

-Scott Sumner, from this post on the financing of commercial developers and moral hazards

via

What am I doing?...........................

     Asking yourself, What am I doing? will help you overcome the habit of wanting to complete things quickly.  Smile to yourself and say, Washing this dish is the most important job in my life.  When you ask, What am I doing?, reflect deeply on the question.  If your thoughts are carrying you away, you need mindfulness to intervene.  When you are really there, washing the dishes can be a deep and enjoyable experience.  But if you wash them while thinking about other things, you are wasting your time, and probably not washing the dishes well either.  If you are not there, even if you wash 84,000 dishes, you work will be without merit.
     Emperor Wu asked Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism in China, how much merit he had earned by building temples all over the country.  Bodhidharma said, "None whatsoever."  But if you wash one dish in mindfulness, if you build one small temple while dwelling deeply in the present moment - not wanting to be anywhere else, not caring about fame or recognition - the merit from that act will be boundless, and you will feel very happy.  Ask yourself, What am I doing? often.  When your thinking is not carrying you away and you do things in mindfulness, you will be happy and a resource for many others.

-Thich Nhat Hanh,  The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching:  Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation

as long as.................................

"Wherever you go you will find your teacher, as long as you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear."

-Shunryu Suzuki

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

The Beatles..........................................Magical Mystery Tour



Released in November of 1967, this album, and this song, was a major part of the sound track for 1968.

As a "criterion for judgement"................

.............................."Does it spark Joy?" is a pretty good one.

Magnitude..............................

     Contemporary America is often now seen through the lens of ancient Athens, both as a center of culture and as an unpredictable imperial power that can arbitrarily impose democracy on friends and enemies alike.   Thomas Paine long ago spelled this natural affinity out:  "What Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude."  Like ancient Athenians, present-day Americans are often said to believe that  "they can be opposed in nothing," and abroad can "equally achieve what was easy and what was hard."  Although Americans offer the world a radically egalitarian popular culture and, more recently, in a very Athenian mood, have sought to remove oligarchs and impose democracy - in Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq - enemies, allies, and neutrals alike are not so impressed.  They understandably fear American power and intentions while our successive governments, in the manner of confident and proud Athenians, assure them of our morality and selflessness.   Military power and idealism about bringing about perceived civilization to others are a prescription for frequent conflict in any age ...

-Victor Davis Hanson,  A War Like No Other:  How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

On paying attention............

     And, of course, Jesus says that the greatest commandment is this:  loving God and loving our neighbors.  I don't know what it means to love God - really, I'm not all that good at it - but I think one of the things it means is, just as in the case of loving everybody else, you stop and watch and wait.  Listen for God, stop and watch and wait for him.  To love God means to pay attention, be mindful, be open to the possibility that God is with you in ways that, unless you have your eyes open, you may never glimpse.  He speaks words that, unless you have your ears open, you may never hear.  Draw near to him as best you can.

-Frederick Buechner,   The Remarkable Ordinary

On circumstance..........................

     As a progressive and evolving being, man is where he is that he may learn that he may grow;  and as he learns the spiritual lesson which any circumstance contains for him, it passes away and gives place to other circumstances.
     Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions, but when he realizes that he is a creative power, and that he may command the hidden soil and seeds of his being out of which circumstances grow, he then becomes the rightful master of himself.

-James Allen,  As A Man Thinketh

Tempting.......................

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

The Beatles..........................................................Dear Prudence

Connectivity problems..............

        
           One of the glorious things about American culture in our day is that people leave you alone. There is more freedom than ever before. You can be who you want to be, and judgment rarely comes. You can dress the way you like, eat what you want, be the you you want to be, and much of the time, if you live in the right cities anyway, your choices will not be just tolerated but celebrated. We are free in so many dimensions to mold our identity as we see fit and there is something incredibly beautiful about this opportunity.
        And yet, one of the most horrific things about American culture in our day is that people leave you alone. You can sleep on the street, be mentally disturbed, use the sidewalk as a latrine, medicate yourself into oblivion and no one will say a thing. They will simply avert their eyes and give you your privacy. Oh, you might get a dollar or two from a sympathetic passerby, but no one will tell you to clean up your act. Few will actually try to connect with you in any meaningful way. In the right cities, no one will arrest you for vagrancy, and certainly no one will force you into what we used to call an insane asylum and medicate you against your will. There are many glorious things about this tolerance. But there is something horrific about it, too.

-Russ Roberts, from this essay, The Lonely Man with a Gun

via

Thucydides......................

Then there is the matter of Thucydides himself.  Greece's preeminent historian was not merely an analytical and systematic writer of a great extant military history of Sparta and Athens.  He was also a brilliant philosopher who tried to impart to the often obscure events of the war a value that transcended his age.  In his own boast, his narrative would prove to be "a possession for all time,"  far more important than the war itself.
     Precisely because of this didactic nature of Thucydides' lengthy narrative - predicated on the belief that human nature is unchanging across time and space and thus predictable - the conflict of Athens and Sparta is supposed to serve as a lesson for what can happen to any people in any war in any age.  A central theme is the use and abuse of power, and how it lurks behind men's professions of idealism and purported ideology.  What men say, the speeches diplomats give, the reasons states go to war, all this "in word" (logos) is as likely to cloak rather than to elucidate what they will do "in deed" (ergon).  Thucydides teaches us to embrace skepticism, expecting us to look to national self-interest, not publicized grievances, when wars of our own age inevitably break out.

-Victor Davis Hanson,  A War Like No Other

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

The Beatles.....................................While My Guitar Gently Weeps

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

In April 404 B.C. the Spartan admiral Lysander finally led his vast armada of ships, crammed with some 10,000 jubilant seamen, into the hated port of Athens at the Piraeus to finish the Peloponnesian War.   After the destruction of its imperial fleet at the battle of Aegospotami ("Goat Rivers") in the waters off Asia Minor the prior September, the once splendid city of Athens was now utterly defenseless.  Worse still was to come.  It was soon surrounded, broke, jammed with refugees, starving, and near revolution.  Such and end would have seemed utterly inconceivable just three decades earlier when a defiant Pericles promised his democracy victory.  But then neither had 80,000 Athenians fallen to plague nor 500 ships been sunk at Sicily and on the Aegean.

-Victor Davis Hanson, from the Prologue to A War Like No Other:  How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

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

The Peloponnesian War is now 2,436 years in the past.  Yet Athens and Sparta are still on our minds and will not go away.  Their permanence seems odd.  After all, ancient Greek warring parties were mere city-states, most of them smaller in population than Dayton, Ohio, or Trenton, New Jersey.  Mainland Greece itself is no larger than Alabama, and in antiquity was bordered by empires like the Persian, which encompassed nearly one million square miles with perhaps 70 million subjects.  Napoleon's army alone had more men under arms by 1800 than the entire male population of all the Greek city-states combined.  In our own age, more people died in Rwanda or Cambodia in a few days then were lost in twenty-seven years of civil war in fifth-century B.C. Greece.

-Victor Davis Hanson,  A War Like No Other:  How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

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

The Beatles....................Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

Happy Halloween...................

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

The Beatles..........................................................Rocky Raccoon

Anxious.............................

"Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but they are unwilling to improve themselves;  they therefore remain bound."

-James Allen

Five good minutes..........................

.........................................................with Buster Keaton

This explains a lot..................

our species tends to think in terms of narrowly defined problems, and usually pays little attention to the most important feature of these problems: the wider context in which they are embedded. When we think we are solving the problem, we are in fact disrupting the context. Most consequences will then be unintended.

-Martin Gurri, from this upcoming book

via

Guess I'm slowing down..............

Bruce Johnson & The Beach Boys......................Disney Girls

Clearing skies and drying eyes
Now I see your smile
Darkness goes and softness shows
A changing style

Just in time words that rhyme
Well bless your soul
Now I'll fill your hands
With kisses and a Tootsie Roll

Oh reality, it's not for me
And it makes me laugh
Oh, fantasy world and Disney girls
I'm coming back

Patti Page and summer days
On old Cape Cod
Happy times making wine
In my garage
Country shade and lemonade

Guess I'm slowing down
It's a turned back world
With a local girl
In a smaller town

Open cars and clearer stars
That's what I've lacked
But fantasy world and Disney girls
I'm coming back

Love...Hi Rick and Dave
Hi Pop...Well good morning mom
Love...get up guess what
I'm in love with a girl I found
She's really swell
Cause she likes
Church, bingo chances and old time dances

All my life I spent the night
With dreams of you
And the warmth I missed
And for the things I wished
They're all coming true

I've got my love to give
And a place to live
Guess I'm gonna stay
It'd be a peaceful life
With a forever wife
And a kid someday

It's earlier nights
And pillow fights
And your soft laugh
Fantasy world and Disney girls
I'm coming back

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

On Broadway.....................................................................Hair

See.......................

"See what's there, not what you expect to see.  See what is really present in your life.  See yourself, see each other."

-Frederick Buechner,  The Remarkable Ordinary

Color me doubtful......................

But the real problem with the idea that Judaism contributed monotheism to the world is that this is hardly something to be proud of.   From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human  history.
     Monotheism did little to improve the moral standards of humans - do you really think Muslims are inherently more ethical than Hindus just because Muslims believe in a single god while Hindus believe in many gods?  Were Christian conquistadores more ethical than pagan Native American tribes?  What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  21 Lessons for the 21st Century

You've likely heard the expression that getting a lot more money will only make you more of what you already are.   Human nature being what it is, I suspect the same is true of religious faith.

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

At the movies...................................................................Oliver!

 

Train..............................

"We need to train ourselves to stop and think. That isn’t easy, because neither the dark art of political rhetoric nor the context-stripping of social media is conducive to a reflective state of mind."

-Tim Harford, as culled from this blog post

May you ever be young.................

via

Careful what you wish for...............

“Namque pauci libertatem, pars magna iustos dominos volunt."
(Few men desire freedom, the greater part desire just masters.)

-Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus)


via Maggie's Farm

Content...............................

     Someone asked me, "Aren't you worried about the state of the world?"  I allowed myself to breathe and then I said, "What is most important is not to allow your anxiety about what happens in the world to fill your heart.  If your heart is filled with anxiety, you will get sick, and you will not be able to help."  There are wars - big and small - in many places, and that can cause us to lose our peace.  Anxiety is the illness of our age.  We worry about ourselves, our family, our friends, our work, and the state of the world.  If we allow worry to fill our hearts, sooner or later we will get sick.
     Yes, there is tremendous suffering all over the world, but knowing this need not paralyze us.  If we practice mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful sitting, and working in mindfulness, we can try our best to help, and we can have peace in our heart.  Worrying does not accomplish anything.  Even if you worry twenty times more, it will not change the situation of the world.  In fact, your anxiety will only make things worse.  Even though things are not as we would like, we can still be content, knowing we are trying our best and will continue to do so.  If we don't know how to breath, smile, and live every moment of our life deeply, we will never be able to help anyone.  I am happy in the present moment.   I do not ask for anything else.  I do not expect additional happiness or conditions that will bring about more happiness.  The most important practice is aimlessness, not running after things, not grasping.

-Thich Nhat Hanh,  The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching:  Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation

Watching, always watching................

“Even though you try to put people under control, it is impossible. You cannot do it. The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in a wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good. That is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.” 

-Shunryu Suzuki,  Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Watching ... Always watching..............

the moment....................

An old silent pond.
Into the pond a frog jumps.
Splash.  Silence again.

     The whole genius of haiku is that they don't mean anything.  People who try to figure out what a haiku means are beating up the wrong path.  The frog doesn't stand for anything.  The pond has no symbolic value or anything like that.  All of these things that other literature might be attempting are not attempted by the haiku at all.  The haiku settles for doing, as I read it anyway, one very simple but very crucial thing - it tries to put a frame around the moment.  It simply frames the moment.  Of course, as soon as you put a frame around anything, you set it off, you make it visible, you make it real. Haiku enables us to see, to experience, this moment that is framed ...

-Frederick Buechner,  The Remarkable Ordinary:  How to Stop, Look, And Listen To Life

Me too............................

"I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay Self-Reliance

Authority...........................

29.  Erasing all fancies, keep on saying to yourself,   'It lies in my own hands to ensure that no viciousness, cupidity, or turmoil of any kind finds a home in this soul of mine;  it lies with me to perceive all things in their true light, and to deal with each of them as it merits.'  Remember this authority, which is nature's gift to you.

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations, Book Eight

This song has been playing...................

........................in my head all morning.   Can't think of a reason why I shouldn't plant it in yours too.

The Beach Boys with Kathy Troccoli.................I Can Hear Music

 

Ahhhhhh oooooo

This is the way
I always dreamed it would be
The way that it is, oh oh
When you are holding me
I never had a love of my own
Maybe that's why when we're all alone

I can hear music
I can hear music
The sound of the city baby seems to disappear
I can hear music
Sweet sweet music
Whenever you touch me baby
Whenever you're near

Lovin' you
It keeps me satisfied
And I can't explain, oh no
The way I'm feeling inside
You look at me we kiss and then
I close my eyes and here it comes again

I can hear music
I can hear music
The sound of the city baby seems to disappear
I can hear music
Sweet sweet music
Whenever you touch me baby
Whenever you're near

I hear the music all the time, yeah
I hear the music, hold me tight now baby
I hear the music all the time
I hear the music
I hear the music (baby)

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

Blood, Sweat, and Tears.......................................And When I Die



This Laura Nyro tune was recorded by BS&T in October of 1968 and released in December of the same year.

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

The Electric Flag...................................................Killing Floor

 

Color me doubtful...........

     In the beginning, nearly fourteen billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.

-Neil deGrasse Tyson, from the opening paragraph to Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Obligations.....................

"The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."

-Neil deGrasse Tyson

Loafing....................

In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly.  You don't get anywhere by not "wasting" time - something, unfortunately, that parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.  He was in Pavia.  He had joined his family, having abandoned his studies in Germany, unable to endure the rigors of his high school there.  It was the beginning of the twentieth century, and in Italy the beginning of its industrial revolution.  His father, an engineer, was installing the first electricity-generating power plant in the Paduan plains.  Albert was reading Kant and attending occasional lectures at the University of Pavia:  for pleasure, without being registered there or having to think about exams.  It is thus that serious scientists are made.

-Carlo Rovelli, the opening paragraph of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

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

The Rascals..............................................................Silly Girl

 

Variables...................

People are asking — are the markets predicting a recession?   The old joke is that the stock market has predicted 9 out of the last 5 recessions. ... I suppose it’s possible the stock market has gotten more intelligent about sniffing out an oncoming recession.  It’s also possible the stock market just freaks out from time-to-time because there are so many other variables that move the markets outside of the economy.

-Ben Carlson, as taken from this blog post

Fun with the language, or, let there be light.....

We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself. We can and do make small and tedious lives as we sail through the cosmos on our uncannily lovely little planet, and this is surely remarkable. But we do so much else besides. For example, we make language. ... Some students in France drew my attention to the enormous number of English words that describe the behavior of light. Glimmer, glitter, glister, glisten, gleam, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine, and so on. These old words are not utilitarian. They reflect an aesthetic attention to experience that has made, and allows us to make, pleasing distinctions among, say, a candle flame, the sun at its zenith, and the refraction of light by a drop of rain.

-Marilynne Robinson, via one of David Kanigan's lovely blogs

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

The Rascals...........................................................It's Wonderful

The Fountain of Goodness...............

"Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready to flow if you will keep digging."
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7,59

Today, we could hope that goodness comes our way - good news, good weather, good luck.  Or we could find it ourselves, in ourselves.  Goodness isn't something that's going to be delivered by mail.  You have to dig it up inside your own soul.  You find it within your own thoughts, and you make it with your own actions.

-Ryan Holiday, yesterday's reading from The Daily Stoic

Where you are......................

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” 

-Desmond Tutu

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

Simon & Garfunkel............................................At The Zoo