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November 15, 2023 - October 4, 2024
Thus, if things are made too safe, people (including children) start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again.165
We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued.
Men enforce a code of behaviour on each other, when working together. Do your work. Pull your weight. Stay awake and pay attention. Don’t whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don’t suck up and don’t snitch. Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. Don’t, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man. Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.
More importantly, he puts his plan into action.
Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack?211 The answer? Limitation.
If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be.
Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No...
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Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation. Perhaps this is because Being requires Becoming, as well as mere static existence—and to become is to become something more, or at least something different. That is only possible for something limited.
Hating life, despising life—even for the genuine pain that life inflicts—merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse.
Put the things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good better.
People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, they are truly lost.
You must decide whether to insist upon the absolute correctness of your view, or to listen and negotiate. You don’t get peace by being right. You just get to be right, while your partner gets to be wrong—defeated and wrong. Do that ten thousand times and your marriage will be over (or you will wish it was). To choose the alternative—to seek peace—you have to decide that you want the answer, more than you want to be right.
“What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?”
Consider, as well, that you may be blocked in your progress not because you lack opportunity, but because you have been too arrogant to make full use of what already lies in front of you.
To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell. And once in Hell it is very easy to curse Being itself.
