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January 8 - January 12, 2019
The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.
Are you enabling a delusion? Is it possible that your contempt would be more salutary than your pity?
You’re associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for anyone, but because it’s easier.
Also because of greivance and blame of everyone else for failings.
You’ve all decided to sacrifice the future to the present.
Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable.
Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today’s cheap pleasures. As the infamous father of the Simpson clan puts it, immediately prior to downing a jar of mayonnaise and vodka, “That’s a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy!”66
Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable.
The desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress.
And none of this is a justification for abandoning those in real need to pursue your narrow, blind ambition, in case it has to be said.
You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite.
Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Inside us dwells a critical internal voice and spirit that knows all this.
Most of us.
We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be.
A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined: things are so terrible that only delusion can save you.
Fake it to make it.
The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms.
Furthermore, if there was no better and worse, nothing would be worth doing.
Meaning itself requires the difference between better and worse. How,
then, can the voice of critical self-consciousness be stilled? Where are the flaws in the apparently impeccable logic of its message?
There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by this binary system, and the consequences are not good.
It’s also unlikely that you’re playing only one game.
You might consider judging your success across all the games you play.
Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.
That way your motivation to do anything at all can be most effectively undermined.
Who are you? You think you know, but maybe you don’t.
You could watch the precious days tick by. Or you could learn how to entice yourself into sustainable, productive activity.
Do you ask yourself what you want? Do you negotiate fairly with yourself? Or are you a tyrant, with yourself as slave?
Dare, instead, to be dangerous. Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express (or at least become aware of) what would really justify your life.
Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology.
When you have something to say, silence is a lie—and tyranny feeds on lies.
We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction.
The first step, perhaps, is to take stock. Who are you?
Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.
hope,
But also the right path and activity it is the journeyon the moment not the destination of itself.
Imagine that you are someone with whom you must negotiate. Imagine further that you are lazy, touchy, resentful and hard to get along with. With that attitude,
Better, in your own private opinion, by your own individual standards? Could you compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday?
And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different.
life doesn’t have the problem. You do. At least that realization leaves you with some options. If your life is not going well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is insufficient, not life itself.
The world is still there, with its structures and limits. As you move along with it, it cooperates or objects. But you can dance with it, if your aim is to dance—and maybe you can even lead, if you have enough skill and enough grace.
Thus, we must become conscious of our desires, and articulate them, and prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies.
Our values, our morality—they are indicators of our sophistication.
Of course, there must be vision, beyond discipline; beyond dogma. A tool still needs a purpose.
It means the opposite. It means instead that you must quit manoeuvring and calculating and conniving and scheming and enforcing and demanding and avoiding and ignoring and punishing.
Classic tao. Dont lean push or pull just observe and follow - centred.
Pay attention. Focus on your surroundings, physical and psychological.
Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day.
There are terrible things lurking there: tax forms, and bills and letters from people wanting things you aren’t sure you can deliver.
You will soon find that the entire pile shrinks in significance, merely because you have looked at part of it. And you’ll find that the whole thing is made of parts.
Let the tasks for the day announce themselves for your contemplation.
“What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?”
Align yourself, in your soul, with Truth and the Highest Good.
The Sermon on the Mount outlines the true nature of man, and the proper aim of mankind: concentrate on the day, so that you can live in the present, and attend completely and properly to what is right in front of you—but do that only after you have decided to let what is within shine forth, so that it can justify Being and illuminate the world.
