“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you’re heading.” - Lao Tzu
A man visits his doctor as he’s worried about his wife who is getting acutely deaf but refuses to acknowledge it. ‘The doctor says he can’t help unless he knows how deaf she really is and suggests, when she isn’t looking, the husband stands at the opposite end of the room and asks her a question. If she doesn’t respond, to take three paces forward and ask again, and so on. When the husband gets home he finds she’s cooking. Fortuitously the kitchen is extremely large. Standing as far away as possible he asks what’s for supper. She doesn’t reply. He advances three paces and asks again. No response. He takes another three paces and leaning forward shouts in her ear. Startled, she shouts back, ‘Chicken.’ And then adds, ‘for christsakes, what’s wrong with you ? I’ve already told you three times.’ (Art Of Looking Sideways — Alan Fletcher)
Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in the course of a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.”
—
Paul Auster
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. IV (New York: Picador, 2009), 328.
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It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
– Robert M. Pirsig
'Perfectionism isn't a high standard, it's just a fear in disguise'
“People often, for example, oppose the actions and belief systems of billionaires, but take jobs at companies that increase the power and influence of those same billionaires. It’s not because these job-seekers are bad people, but because we are all operating in a system that makes aligning our values and our everyday lives seem impossible.”
https://vsanchezgomez.substack.com/p/micro-compartmentalization
"A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd" - Islwyn Jeneins
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.
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Today I have a suggested addition to your next museum visit or gallery hop or art-viewing journey. It’s borrowed from, or at least inspired by, the recent book Get The Picture, by Bianca Bosker¹.
Get The Picture got lots of attention for taking a buzzy peek into the high-end art world, including its occasional absurdities. And that is very fun stuff. But also, threaded through the book, and animating its concluding section, is an articulation of Bosker’s evolving sense of how to appreciate art, and looking and perception in general. Some of that material has a very TAoN vibe.
Among other things, Bosker spends time as a museum guard at the Guggenheim in New York, and based on that and all her art-looking adventures, she sketches the parameters for the museum tour she would like to lead. To quote her directly:
One: You don’t have to look at everything.
Two: You do have to look at something for at least five minutes.
Three: Don’t you dare lay eyes on the wall text— that is, the...
I think freedom, ideally, is being able to choose your responsibilities. Not not having any responsibilities, but being able to choose which things you want to be responsible for.
– Toni Morrison
Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music. – Goethe
Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.
– Max Frisch
Psychology identifies two core types of happiness:
Hedonic: Achieved through pleasure, enjoyment, and satisfaction.
Eudaimonic: Achieved through meaning, purpose, and authenticity.
Hedonic happiness is associated with a focus on maximizing short-term pleasure and minimizing pain.
Eudaimonic happiness is associated with a focus on virtue or value-oriented living. It was first proposed by Aristotle, who argued that achieving long-term, durable happiness required people to live in accordance with their values and focus on a higher purpose or meaning.
"Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers." - Voltaire
“What’s this for?”
Says the carpenter
as he saws it off.
Japanese Senryu
the doctor has a cold
but he's eating noodle soup
and resting in bed
Japanese Senryu
the grumbler
finally stands up to leave
then grumbles for an hour
Japanese Senryu
"When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it—but all that had gone before." - Jacob Riis
When describing the origins of "Gangsta's Paradise" Coolio once said that he didn't write the song, the song wrote him.
The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.
– @morganhousel