Ralph Waldo Emerson on your success:
“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.“
Austin Kleon had a good post this week on curiosity and the absence of certainty. And, I agree with Austin that Ravelli’s writing also applies to art.
The physicist Carlo Rovelli has a beautiful way of talking about science in terms of ignorance and curiosity.
In Helgoland: Making Sense of Quantum Revolution, he writes:
I believe that one of the greatest mistakes made by human beings is to want certainties when trying to understand something. The search for knowledge is not nourished by certainty: it is nourished by a radical absence of certainty. Thanks to the acute awareness of our ignorance, we are open to doubt and can continue to learn and to learn better. This has always been the strength of scientific thinking—thinking born of curiosity, revolt, change.
The School of Life has a great suggestion this week: walk. Yes, I know you probably are fortunate enough to walk every day but do you walk walks?
A walk is, in a sense, the smallest sort of journey we can ever undertake. It stands in relation to a typical holiday as a bonsai tree does to a forest.
But even if it is only an eight-minute interlude around the block or a few moments in a nearby park, a walk is already a journey in which many of the grander themes of travel are present.
The need to go for a walk begins from the same place as the longing to take off to another country: with a desire to restart our minds. We sometimes cannot work it all out by staying rooted in one place. We have stared at the screen too long, we have been bumping into the same inner obstacles without progress, we have grown claustrophobic with ourselves.
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.
~Simon Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence”
Get your fingers out. It is 50% gone. What are you going to do with the last half?
With the pandemic, the current and coming fires in California, national and state politics, crime statistics and collapsing buildings, I tend to walk (not run) into each morning’s news and my to-do list. But I must admit – the weather DOES make a difference. Maybe because life IS so complicated, when I find myself in the middle of a beautiful summer day… lately I SEE it.
I notice. I stop. I look. This has been going on for a couple of weeks so I found the School of Life essay below interesting.
Evidently I am not alone.
Imagine a sunny day, one in which many people, on walking out of the house for the first time, will note a particular brightness to the light, and a balminess to the air, which may trigger a surge of hope and a willingness to look at familiar problems with renewed determination.
The pleasure that can be triggered by good weather is, at one level, absurd. Gratitude for the sun belongs to a category of satisfaction that feels humiliatingly simple. It’s tempting to deny the significance of the weather altogether – especially for philosophers – and to focus instead on more substantial political and economic issues, by which the course of our lives is overwhelmingly determined. We should surely be able to rise above minor frustrations like eleven days of rain and a persistent glacial wind from the north.
But in reality, our behaviour reveals a devotion to a simple, even simplistic, truth: our faith in ourselves and our prospects is frequently determined by nothing grander than the number of photons of light in the sky and degrees of warmth in the air. Heat, pleasant breezes, intense sunlight and fresh flowers may play a critical role in encouraging us not to give up on things.
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