I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
~ Søren Kierkegaard
Several days ago on NPR, the delightful Tom Ashbrook hosted philosophical questioner Maria Popova on On Point. Typically, scholarly conversations that speculate about the purpose of life elicit a groan from the bowels of my soul, along with the mental image of grizzled elders picking their noses while pontificating on the minutia of meaning and its definition.
Perhaps it happened to be the right time to hear Tom and Maria’s discussion because I found myself swept along with each word. Here were two people discussing modern everyday queries, but they addressed these through the lens of philosophers and thinkers from the ancient days all the way to the present. It finally became clear to me that folks have been contemplating the same root issues and challenges throughout the centuries—echoes multiplied over the millennia. What is love? What is purpose? What is of worth? What is trust? What is the point? (And yes, even those in the direst of circumstances can still wonder, perhaps even more so than those in better situations. Simply read one of the many accounts written by Auschwitz survivors to see the trail of questions and the search for purpose that helped them to live through such an ordeal.)Continue Reading
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
~ Adrienne Rich
I don’t know what to do about climate change. Don’t stop reading! I promise this won’t be yet another depressing article about something many of us feel powerless to stop.
Increasing numbers have noticed environmental differences and much of the public’s focus has been on trying to establish the cause. There are some folks who argue that it’s manmade and irreversible now, and others who assert that the irregular weather patterns are part of the earth’s natural, cyclical phases over eons. To me, the why of it is moot. It’s clear that big changes are underway either way.
My concern is how life, with its many human and non-human members, is going to cope with the altered environment, and as such, I am always delighted to see viable, reasonable solutions offered for the some of the challenges that we may face. Check out the TED Talk by Allan Savory below. Clean water, sustainable food production, desertification, and preserving biodiversity are already pressing issues. His proposal tackles all of these:
It’s been some time since I’ve been able to update Notions. Besides being extraordinarily busy for the last month, it’s been challenging to pick new topics to share and discuss. A large amount of effort went into the design and creation of this website, so now that everything is in place, it’s intimidating to stare at a blinking cursor.
But not THAT intimidating. Here’s a status update for my ongoing projects:
There will be other articles in the meantime (science, psychology, humor!), but this is the grand plan for the next thirty days.