"Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation." ~Habakkuk 3:17-18
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"Don't worry; be happy." ~Bobby McFerrin
"When we recognize that we have a habit of replaying old events and reacting to new events as if they were the old ones, we can begin to notice when that habit energy comes up. We can then gently remind ourselves that we have another choice. We can look at the moment as it is, a fresh moment, and leave the past for a time when we can look at it compassionately." ~Thích Nhất Hạnh
CEO Eddie Lampert, for the uninitiated, brought a hedge-fund-style model of management to Sears. A fan of Ayn Rand and a believer in the free markets, he told division chiefs to run their divisions individualistically, believing that would help boost sales and profits at each unit, according to Bloomberg. Instead, the units started infighting, with one executive telling the publication that it lead to a "warring tribes" environment.
Darwin was no trendsetter when he began reading the Reverend Thomas Malthus's bestseller An Essay on the Principle of Population. On the contrary, Darwin was trailing well behind fashionable opinion, for the book had been published in 1798 and had gone through six editions, each selling more than the last. Malthus wrote the book while working as a rural curate in Surrey; yet it became one of the most influential texts in the history of political economy. Malthus, thought hard-minded Victorians, explained why Poor Relief didn't work, and why it would be better in the long run to let the Irish starve.
Malthus's book scrutinized wars, famines, price crashes and economic shortages which troubled mankind and coolly pointed out that whatever the variables, whatever the conditions, whatever the differences, two things would always be the same. When food supplies (which he called "the means of subsistence") increased, they could never increase faster than arithmetically: by a certain percentage a year. But human populations, said Malthus, increase exponentially. A couple produces five children, each of those children produce five children, each of those grandchildren produce five children and suddenly one married couple have a hundred and twenty-five descendants.
Thus, a human population can grow far quicker than the supply of food ever can. And as soon as populations are increasing faster than the food supply, said Malthus, checks will come into play. These 'checks' will include plagues, wars and most of all, starvation and famine. A new generation of children die; there is enough food to go round. For Malthus it was simply a question of mathematical patterns.
Darwin's insight whilst reading Malthus concentrated on those checks. For Darwin, the natural world was a place of incredible competition for food, for security, for a chance to reproduce. Darwin took Malthus's idea of many more individuals being born that would ever be able to survive, each competing against the other for the basic right to continue living. He considered his own experience of the natural world: the huge masses of frogspawn in spring ponds, the large litters of farm cats. This image of a seething mass of individuals stayed with Darwin.
To His Coy Mistress
By Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
I did not realize that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.
"There are more than two chances-- many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance." ~Jeanette Winterson, in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? ©2011
She loved miracle stories, probably because her life was as far away from a miracle as Jupiter is from the Earth. She believed in miracles, even though she never got one-- well, maybe she did get one, but that was me, and she didn't know that miracles often come in disguise.
I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything-- the miracle-- is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.
Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same thing as being happy-- which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.
If the sun is shining, stand in it-- yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass-- they have to-- because time passes.
The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered.
What you are pursuing is meaning-- a meaningful life. There's the hap-- the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use-- that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.
The pursuit isn't all or nothing-- it's all AND nothing. Like all Quest Stories.
But Thaddeus Stevens, though privately declaring the (14th) amendment a “shilly-shally bungling thing,” publicly explained that nothing better could be accomplished under present circumstances. “In my youth, in my manhood, in my old age,” he told the House, “I had fondly dreamed that when any fortunate chance should have broken up for a while the foundation of our institutions, and released us from obligations the most tyrannical that ever man imposed in the name of freedom, that the intelligent, pure and just men of this Republic, true to their profession and their consciences, would have so remodeled all our institutions as to have freed them from every vestige of human oppression, of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich. In short, that no distinction would be tolerated in this purified Republic but what arose from merit and conduct.” This dream, however, had vanished in the crucible of war and its terrible aftermath. “I find that we shall be obliged to be content with patching up the worst portions of the ancient edifice, and leaving it, in many of its parts, to be swept through by the tempests, the frosts, and the storms of despotism.” Stevens had reconciled himself to what was possible. “Do you inquire why, holding these views and possessing some will of my own, I accept so imperfect a proposition? I answer, because I live among men and not among angels.”
Jay: You know what they say: "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
Kay: Try it.
"They will want the old political system of caucuses, legislatures, etc., to amuse them and make them believe they are real sovereigns; but in all things they will follow blindly the lead of the planters."
"The President was in deep distress," Attorney General Edward Bates recorded. "He seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish--said he felt almost ready to hang himself." Lincoln had never been religious, but now he began searching for guidance from above. "The will of God prevails," he mused privately. "In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party." The ways of the Almighty were inscrutable. "He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds."
"It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies… The fathers would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable." ~Ulysses Grant on the U.S. Constitution, quoted in The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses S. Grant in War and Peace by H.W. Brands ©2012
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In 1610, twelve years before Kircher arrived in Cologne, Galileo Galilei, a mathematics professor in Padua, published a slim volume, Starry Messenger, about the observations he'd made with a new instrument he called the perspicillium, or the telescope. It was a very much improved-upon version of the spyglasses that had recently begun to appear in Europe. The configuration (a concave lens at one of a tube, and a convex lens at the other) was fairly simple, but Galileo's handcrafted device made things appear, as he wrote, "nearly one thousand times larger and over thirty times closer" than they would with the naked eye. Among other discoveries, he observed four moons revolving around Jupiter. The most basic implication of this was clear to any student of natural philosophy willing to admit it. (At the Jesuit school of La Flèche in Anjou, a student named René Descartes is said to have written a sonnet celebrating the news.) If moons revolved around Jupiter, maybe earth wasn't really the center of the universe, around which everything revolved. Galileo also reported that "the moon is not robed in a smooth and polished surface," as Aristotelian doctrine had it, "but is in fact rough and uneven, covered everywhere, just like the Earth's surface, with huge prominences, deep valleys, and chasms."
The Church seemed willing at first to consider these findings. Clavius and other Jesuit astronomers held a reception for Galileo in Rome, and while Clavius declared telescopes "troublesome to operate," he confirmed the existence of moons around Jupiter. On the question of the rough surface of the moon, however, the seventy-one-year-old astronomer couldn't bring himself to believe his eyes. Perhaps the moon was just unevenly dense, he suggested. In a letter to the Church's chief theologian, a group of Jesuit astronomers wrote together that they were "not sufficiently certain" about the matter. In other words, preconceived notions were such that Clavius couldn't see through a telescope what modern people, who know the truth, can recognize with the naked eye.
"We sometimes use the Buddhist practice of telling (our daughter) Clea 'We call this a tree,' instead of 'This is a tree.'" ~William Powers, in the March 2016 issue of The Lion's Roar
No doubt the most important teaching the world needs to hear from Buddhism-- and from all our world religions-- is compassion.
The Buddhist teachings on love and compassion are, as far as I can tell, unique and radical. They say that others are one's self, and that one's self is others. So the best way to take care of yourself is to take care of others, and vice versa.
This teaching has two practical consequences. First, it means that caring for others isn't guilt-ridden self-sacrifice. It's a joyful extension of identity.
Helping doesn't have to be a big deal. It simply means taking care of what requires care in an ordinary way. This is natural and normal, once you see that we really are one body, not a bunch of contending individuals. It is as natural and normal to use Shantideva's metaphor, as our fingers pulling a thorn out of our foot.
Second, the Buddhist teachings on compassion mean there are infinite ways we can help, in obvious as well as non-obvious ways. The truth is that everyone, regardless of means and capacity, can practice compassion as part of a world movement for the inclusion and benefit of all. This means caring for others, benefiting them, and doing whatever we can to ensure a world in which there is more justice and more love than ever before.
"Years of opera training will make you pronounce your g’s, t’s, d’s and all the other hard consonants that everyone forgets about. It’s like sex: I do it because it feels good. Go ahead and properly pronounce all the words in your sentences for a full day, it feels like talking dirty. It’s like chocolate, or silk, or creamy smooth custard. Annunciation almost feels perverse. I love it." ~Bonnie Montleon (via)
