You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—depends on that.
~ Arnold Bennett
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If there’s somewhere I need to be, I need to start walking. It’s insightful, but it begs a few questions. Do I really understand “where” I need to be (that is to say, what does the word “where” really stand for if I’m to use the proverb)? Is there a path from “here” to “there”? And really sticky question: Are there any true obstacles, like gates with gatekeepers, between “here” and “there”?
The world is full of gatekeepers who think they have veto rights. Don’t believe them. If you need them to invest time or resources then they deserve to have a say, otherwise the responsibility remains with you to decide how to proceed and to suffer the consequences or reap the rewards, as the case may be.
~ Andrew Bosworth from, Ask for Advice, Not Permission
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There are many ways (metaphorical and literal) to go over, under, around and through gates and gatekeepers. I’ve always visualized the proverbial gatekeeper as part of a structure surrounding something, keeping me out. But why that orientation?
Recall Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide wherein one character builds an asylum for the world; A “house” with the “interior” stuff (carpet, furniture, lights, curtains, etc) on the outside, exposed to the elements, and with a central space with no roof, faced with the exterior parts of a home. In that center was “outside” the asylum and the entire rest of the world was therefore “inside” the asylum thus constructed.
Why aren’t the gatekeepers seen as denying us access to exit? I don’t want “in” to gain access to some resource or some people. I want “out” to regain my freedom.
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The essence of restorative community building is not economic prosperity or the political discourse or the capacity of leadership; it is citizens’ willingness to own up to their contribution or agency in the current conditions, to be humble, to choose accountability, and to have faith in their own capacity to make authentic promises to create the alternative future.
~ Peter Block
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Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/38
Sometimes I sit and reflect on what it’s all been for. When I am able to briefly clutch a bit of perspective, it’s clear that it’s not all “for” anything specific. Life’s a journey, is none the less true for its being cliché.
The naive activist wants to change the world. But that isn’t necessary: the world is changing anyway.
~ Ed Lake from, Aaron Swartz was on a crusade, that is clear, but for what? | Aeon Essays
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Lately I seem to be stumbling over a large number of “I should probably know who that is” essays. This one about Swartz is one such essay and it filled in some blanks.
But that little bit which I’ve quoted leapt out at me. The world—all of it, from microbes to society, from rock to Gaia—is so absolutely not static. Any urge I’ve ever had to change anything was actually not an urge for a specific change, rather it was an urge for control.
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Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.
~ Gordon Hempton
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Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the web: They might as well not exist.
~ Steven Pinker
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At one point I made a serious attempt at gratitude journaling. I learned that the many moments of delight I encounter on any given day don’t stick in my memory. In those moments I am aware of the experience (I really do think “if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is” often) but it drifts into the forgotten realms. I don’t randomly have thoughts like, “hey Craig, remember that delightful thing from that other moment?” I have to intentionally pause to make a space for those thoughts to appear.
Humans by nature have a strong desire to control and predict. We want to know what happens at the end of the story, and we focus on those things we can measure and easily influence.
~ Cierra Martin from, «https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2022/11/21/more-dancing-less-box-checking/»
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Can one remove a desire? This desire which I definitely have, has not abated through familiarity (something which I believe can cause a desire to fade.) I think the only way is to connect the many experiences which did not go through my control-it desire, and led to happiness. “See brain, we got to delight and there was not even an attempt at control there.” Pausing in moments of delight, as it were, to ask, “well… how did I get here?“
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Gnosce teipsum—know yourself. Know yourself in relation to your overt intentions and your hidden motives, in relation to your thinking, your physical functioning and to those greater not-selves, who see to it that, despite all the ego’s attempts at sabotage, the thinking shall be tolerably relevant and the functioning not too abnormal.
~ Aldous Huxley
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A good upbringing means not that you won’t spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won’t notice it when someone else does.
~ Anton Chekhov
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