You are always responsible because you are always choosing. In every moment, you are choosing how to respond, how to react, how to see things.
Monday, July 27, 2026
Willingness.................
Deliverance is out of time and into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things. We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in the "state of grace." All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.
-Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
interested................
The forms of zest are innumerable. Sherlock Holmes, it may be remembered, picked up a hat which he happened to find lying in the street. After looking at it for a moment he remarked that its owner had come down in the world as a result of drink and that his wife was no longer so fond of him as she used to be. Life could never be boring to a man to whom casual objects offered such a wealth of interest. Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a country walk. One man may be interested in the birds, another in the vegetation, another in the geology, yet another in the agriculture, and so on. Any one of these things is interesting if it interests you, and, other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them is a man better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested.
-Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
Scaffolding....................
Well, let’s go back to David Ausubel’s 1960 experiment. Ausubel gave college students a short conceptual overview before they read difficult, unfamiliar material. The students who got that overview, which he called an advance organizer, retained the material significantly better than the students who went in cold. The idea has held up for sixty years: before you learn something hard, your brain needs a scaffold, a rough map of what’s coming, so new information has somewhere to attach. Without the scaffold, a 2,800-year-old epic poem is just old names and boats. With the scaffold, every page slots into a picture your kid already has in their head.
-Austin Scholar, from this episode
justice.............................
People want to see justice done. It’s part of storytelling, and part of life. It’s not virtuous or kind to let marauders prey on the weak indefinitely. It’s not charitable to let brigands upend the order of a palace of a society. There’s nothing compassionate in letting villains off the hook.
-Spencer Klavan, commenting on Christopher Nolan's film, Odyssey
Noah Smith.................
...............on intelligence, artificial and otherwise:
The common thread in all three of these examples is that AI may revolutionize productivity not by being much smarter than a single individual human — not by simply solving harder and harder math problems — but by marrying human-style intelligence to the vast, inhuman capabilities of computers. We could simply be thinking about the benefits of intelligence wrong — arrogantly privileging the kind of mental tasks we humans happen to do especially well, while ignoring the value of the tasks we do poorly.
Acceptance.................
Acceptance is not surrender. It is the moment you stop wasting energy on what is already true and start using that energy to decide what to do next.
-Shane Parrish, from this week's edition
Sunday, July 26, 2026
Out walking...................
My Sweetie and I ventured out to the greater Toboso region this morning and walked five +/- miles on the Black Hand Gorge trail. Hard to imagine a prettier walk.
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| The Licking River |
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| the "deep cut", created in the 1850s. Believe it or not, but trains used to run here 175 years ago. |
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| the site of the "black hand", destroyed during the canal construction days. Above the laid up stone, traces of the canal tow path still exist |
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| further proof, as if we needed any, that God loves life |
hardness.................
The intellectual as a champion of the masses is a relatively recent phenomenon. Education does not naturally waken in us a concern for the uneducated. The distinction conferred by education is more easily maintained by a sharp separation from those below than be a continued excellence of achievement. When Gandhi was asked by an American clergyman what it was that worried him the most, he replied: "The hardness of heart of the educated."
-Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change
prayer....................
I would say yes to a prayer that reaches out over the companionable objects of our day, yes to prayers for more charity, resilience, good-naturedness, and also a listening kind of praying that is tucked somewhere always in our heart, mystically turning to ever greater reality. What a woeful thing it would be to be denied prayer, to be numbed to its gratitude. We can live without a great deal, but to live entirely without prayer would leave us lesser human beings. Prayer changes our relationships with pretty much everything. It the tribulation of night I turn the wheel of my prayer rope and steer my ship over woeful seas. In the brightness of the longed-for dawn I stare east and am deep-rooted in the wallop of my amazement.
In the end, prayer isn't something we do, it becomes something that we are.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
Insourcing vs Outsourcing.............
We have immersed ourselves to a few mega social media platforms. Angertainment is all the rage. If you think doom scrolling, keeping up with Jones’, and entrusting your engrossment to algos designed to keep you in a constant state of anxiety is the path, have at it. Come for the social isolation and stay for the subsequent depression.
-Tony Isola, from this post
Faith...................
Tolstoy searches in science, philosophy, wisdom and reason and finds no answer to convince him that life is worth living. Science answers many questions, but not the one that obsesses him. He sees too that meaning does not lie in something superadded to life: possessions, achievements, honours, awards. Those are externalities, gift-wrapping, not life itself. The answer that eventually came to Tolstoy was religious faith. 'No matter what answers faith may give, its every answer gives to the finite existence of man the sense of the infinite—a sense which is not destroyed by suffering, privation or death.' Faith, he said is a force of life. 'If a man lives, then he must believe in something.' If that something is finite, it will not ultimately satisfy him, since everything finite eventually perishes. The only thing worth believing in is the infinite. And, 'Without faith it is impossible to live.'
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
On waking up................
There is an old saying that goes, "I slept and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke and saw that life was duty." If you really want to be in control of your life, and if you want other people to be able to depend on you and look to you for leadership, you must wake up from the dream that somebody else will handle the responsibility. You must accept the responsibility of leading both yourself and others. No one else can do it for you. And if you develop the skills of a highly effective leader, not one else can do it as well as you, either.
-Jim Rohn, Leading an Inspired Life
restricted...........
The Master was exceedingly gracious to the University dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations.
To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well—or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?"
-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom
Saturday, July 25, 2026
finding the way..........
My senses and faculties help me to find the way from here to Killarney but on the way back to God they bewilder and impede me.
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
the last laugh..........................
You can do and say a lot of things in hindsight, kicking and screaming and what-about-ing til the cows come home. But the returns are the returns and you can’t change that.
-Downtown Josh Brown, as he interviews Ron Baron, an early (and big) investor in Elon Musk
Old habits interrupted.................
Every morning for the past twelve years (well, 345 days out of 365 anyway), I have walked for 45+ minutes down the hill from our house, across the little bridge, around the OSU-N/COTC campus, and back.
Apparently, bridges do not live forever, as ours has been taken out of commission for the next "111 days."
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| Younger Steve would have crossed this anyway |
Whatever, walks still need to be walked. There are more that 40 miles of paved "recreational trails" around here. This morning, my Sweetie and I traveled by car to the original Licking County bike path (+/-3.5 miles between Granville and Newark, initially paved in the mid-1970s.) It is as pretty as I remember it.
We will try a different path tomorrow.
choices........................
In judging myself, I confront what is inferior in me and recoil from it. Yet none of us can measure our true worth. I can only live in the hope that those around me might say: he is honest; he is kind to the helpless; when the powerful struck, he stood his ground. Such judgments point to generally discoverable moral truths. We have always possessed Taylor’s shared “standards of value”—we have always loved the higher and shunned the lower, even when pretending otherwise.
From the reformation of character follows the public affirmation of the conditions to which good character should aspire. I would do so humbly, guided by truth as I perceive it. Fit is better than fat, for obvious reasons. Together is better than alone, and together for life better still. Strong is better than weak. Let me name the one and pursue the other, knowing that we are flawed vessels, hostage to fortune, and bound often to fall short. Still, all of us can inch toward our highest selves.
-Martin Gurri, as cut-and-pasted from here
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