December 11, 2022 — #10 →

Published December 11, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 11  ·  

Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/10

New York after Paris →

Published December 11, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 11  ·  

The truth is that New York is in the throes of creation. With infinite travail it is taking on a body adequate to its needs, — a feat Paris long ago accomplished. The operation necessarily involves disagreeable surprises, and the immediate result, viewed in its entirety, is, it must be confessed, much more grotesque than impressive. An orchestral performance in which each and every performer played a different tune could hardly be less prepossessing.

~ Alvan F. Sanborn from, New York After Paris

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Items from The Atlantic are appearing more often here on the ‘ol blog. My reading goes through epochs as I discover things that interest me and begin following them via RSS.

However, I landed on this article after a few clicks from another place, and that’s odd. Generally, the things I read do not contain links to other interesting-to-me things. That sounds backwards, perhaps? You see, if I find a place that has something interesting, I follow it in some form or another. So usually, any interesting links I find, point to things I already have seen—or if they’re very fresh, I’m already about to stumble upon shortly. I’m not sure that itself is interesting to report, but there it is.

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Assertion →

Published December 10, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 10  ·  , ,

Your spirit must constantly assert itself because your body is constantly exerting itself. As soon as you stop working at your spirit, then your body will have complete power over you.

~ Leo Tolstoy

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Breath →

Published December 9, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 9  ·  

I’m gobsmacked. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time on breath work. In the last few days, something new clicked into place for me. Hopefully, this saves someone somewhere some time on the learning curve:

Ashtanga yoga is about breathing. You may also notice there is some movement involved in Ashtanga; Don’t be distracted by the movement! The movement is irrelevant if you haven’t discovered the importance of the breathing.

I’ve written a lot about my personal restorative practice. Breathing and relaxing into the things I do has been an important part of it for a loong time. I cherish my 15 years of study in a style of Aikido where breath is integral to the physicality. I spent a few years regularly practicing Tai chi, and later a few years with Yinn yoga. But Ashtanga yoga never clicked for me. Sure, it’s always a great workout. But I could never really get into it as a practice. I’d bet I’ve been in hundreds of situations where someone (random warmups, movement and martial artists of every stripe, and proper yoga instructors of countless flavors) has led what has aspired to be Ashtanga yoga. Without exception, it has always been a bashing struggle for me.

Because it’s about breathing. No two people are going to have the same breathing. Absolutely, I can imagine that at advanced physical and mental levels, people could synchronize their breathing and then they could do Ashtanga yoga in sync. But that’s not me. Not me at all.

To be really clear: I’m not bashing on Ashtanga — nonono. I’m freakin’ excited because now I feel like …scratch that! Now I can practice Ashtanga. I look forward to it! I’m looking forward to practicing it for a while, and then finding an instructor and taking a class to get help improving. Rather than my old, “please lead me through the sequence”, I’m looking forward to, “please help me improve my sequence”. Which I’m betting will be instruction on breath, and maybe some instruction on movements too.

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The way →

Published December 8, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 8  ·  ,

There is no way to happiness— Happiness is the way.

~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

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A quote I cannot find →

Published December 7, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 7  ·  

I’m often pulling up quotes from my own collection. I use them for reminders and inspiration. Today, I had the thought that:

Dreams and passion get you into trouble;
Plans and hard work get you out.

I’m certain this is not a new sentiment. None the less, I couldn’t find it in my collection nor with a few minutes of searching. Does it sound familiar to you? …any idea where a more original source might be?

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A great many troubles →

Published December 6, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 6  ·  , ,

I am an old man, and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

~ Mark Twain

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It’s even better than that →

Published December 5, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 5  ·  ,

I’ve a few readers who really enjoy the Marcus Aurelius quotes in my collection. A few initial Aurelius quotations I collected through my general reading online, before I eventually read Meditations (English translations thereof, to be fair) and pulled a bunch more quotes myself.

I’ve just spent a few hours cleaning up my Aurelius quotes. Mostly this was adding the section number from Meditations to my blog posts. It’s now easy to find the original material. Note that Wikisource has several versions of Meditations available online. But at the risk of sounding snobbish, I really like Gregory Hays’s translation which will go out of copyright (maybe) in 2102. I digress.

During my cleanup, I realized that one of my quotes, “Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.” is not something Aurelius wrote. It’s something the character Marcus Aurelius said in the Movie Gladiator. But it really sounds like him; It’s a great line of dialog for a movie.

It turns out that there are two spots in Meditations which echo the often misattributed quote. In the middle of section 2.17 he writes, “[…] it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed.” which is the sentiment without the cinema flourish. It also doesn’t make perfect sense when you pull it out from its context.

Eventually, you reach the final line of section 12.36 and find, “So make your exit with grace — the same grace shown to you.” That’s literally the final line he wrote as a meditation to himself. Can you imagine that being the last line you wrote to yourself? And thus my title.

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December 04, 2022 — #9 →

Published December 4, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 4  ·  

Reading time: About 6 minutes, 1200 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/9

Scale →

Published December 4, 2022  ·  All posts on Dec 4  ·  

Under one square metre of undisturbed ground in the Earth’s mid-latitudes there might live several hundred thousand small animals. Roughly 90% of the species to which they belong have yet to be named. One gram of this soil – less than a teaspoonful – contains around a kilometre of fungal filaments.

~ George Monbiot from, The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing – and the key to our planet’s future

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There’s mind–boggling complexity in the microscopic realm.

Here’s a quick zoom towards the macroscopic: If you imagine the Earth the size of a peppercorn, then the moon would be a pin-head about 2.5″ inches away. At this scale, the sun is an 8″ ball, sitting 14 yards from the peppercorn Earth. How far away, at this same scale, is the next closest star? It’s thousands of miles at this scale to the Centauri star system (a 4 year trip at the speed of light.) How far is it across our just-average-sized Milky Way galaxy? …and how many stars are here, with our cozy Sol? …and how far to the next galaxy? …how many galaxies? Frankly, I’m confident there’s other life—even other intelligent life—out there. But, will we ever meet each other across such vast gulfs of emptiness?

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