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if you dared, diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing.
Chris mentioned, was “Yankee ingenuity”—putting your smarts to work. “It’s better to be tough than strong, better to be clever than intelligent,” he said, repeating a family maxim. “I was tough and clever.”
The Tao Te Ching says that it is only through retreat rather than pursuit, through inaction rather than action, that we acquire wisdom.
“Those with less become content,” says the Tao, “those with more become confused.”
“Not till we have lost the world,” wrote Thoreau, “do we begin to find ourselves.”
“I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you.”
Nature, Knight clarified, is brutal. The weak do not survive, and neither do the strong. Life is a constant, merciless fight that everyone loses.
He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.
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The Indian writer Jiddu Krishnamurti has been quoted as saying, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.”
When you’re alone, your awareness of time and boundaries grows fuzzy.
“The more you realize, the more you realize there is nothing to realize,” she said. “The idea that there’s somewhere we have got to get to, and something we have to attain, is our basic delusion.”
Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it’s worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets.
