Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"Since, like fire, combat can be both large and small, and has such a ferocious spirit,"

"Having one thing, to understand ten thousand - this is an underlying principle of Strategy."

"The mindset" that overcomes one enemy, or a thousand, or ten thousand is the same."

"as the mind becomes like water: water takes on the shape of whatever container it fills, be it angled or round, and can be a single drop or a vast ocean."

"Through swordsmanship alone, it is difficult to attain the true Way - from large things you must understand the small, and from the shallow you can arrive at the deep. In that it is like a straight path drawn across the terrain, the first I have named the "Ground" scroll."

"Determination in action. Efficiency. Vigilant attention to details. Comprehending form and function. Understanding high, middle and low levels of energy, and how to create morale. Apprehending the intangibles. Everything of this kind - these are all things that are in the mindset of the head carpenter. The principles of military strategy are the same."

"With the master as needle and the disciple as thread, you must train unceasingly."

"Ordinary people usually take one of four paths through life: that of the farmer, merchant, warrior or artisan."

"Someone said that "immature strategy is the source of great injuries", and this is absolutely true."

Looking around the world, you see the various arts being sold as commodities, and people even thinking of themselves as goods for sale, and when they make their equipment, they think of that as something to sell as well.

“Sander once said he believed photography could help “hold fast the history of the world,” but there is no holding history fast. It is always receding and dissolving, not just into the unknowable past but also into the unfixable future.”

“History is merely a list of surprises,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote. “It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.””

“The truth is far more complicated than mere hopelessness.”

“Despair isn’t very productive. That’s the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself.”

“When I was a teenager, I used the why game as a way of establishing that if you dig deep enough, there is no why. I reveled in nihilism. More than that, I liked being certain about it. Certain that everyone who believed life had inherent meaning was an idiot. Certain that meaning is just a lie we tell ourselves to survive the pain of meaninglessness.”

“...the kind of close-to-the-chest joy that can’t last—but also doesn’t need to.”

“As the recession took hold and credit markets froze, experts said we were experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime economic contraction, although as it happened, the next once-in-a-lifetime economic contraction was only twelve years away. We should get out of the habit of saying that anything is once-in-a-lifetime. We should stop pretending we have any idea how long a lifetime is, or what might happen in one.”

“Shouting to be heard over the wind, the tour guide said, “ICELAND HAS MANY NATURAL WONDERS AS YOU CAN SEE THIS WATERFALL IS VERY HISTORIC.” Even now, I cannot look at a waterfall without thinking, “Very historic.””

“What you’re looking at matters, but not as much as how you’re looking or who you’re looking with. That night, I was with just the right person in just the right place, and I’ll be damned if the graupel wasn’t beautiful.”

“Clouds separate us from the sun when we need shade, but they also separate us from the sun when we need light. They are, like the rest of us, quite context-dependent.”

“The poem begins, “all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones / of those who did not make it.” As in Ibn Battuta’s Damascus, the only path forward is true solidarity—not only in hope, but also in lamentation.”

“I’m not here to criticize other people’s hope, but personally, whenever I hear someone waxing poetic about the silver linings to all these clouds, I think about a wonderful poem by Clint Smith called “When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before.’””

“That capacity for listening, I think, really does separate human life from the quasi-life of an enterovirus.”

“I’m grateful that Doi keeps on working, bringing things into existence. I am glad to be unalone in cramped circles of restless yearning.”

“I thought about that old Faulkner line that the past isn’t dead; it’s not even past. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.”

“The pleasure isn’t owning the person. The pleasure is this. Having another contender in the room with you.””

+ Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.””

“After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, “We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing.+

“It happens so routinely that it’s easy for those of us who benefit from these power-ups to see them as fair”

“But I don’t buy the argument that these structural power-ups are irrelevant. The fact that our political, social, and economic systems are biased in favor of the already rich and the already powerful is the single greatest failure of the American democratic ideal.”