If you only live through others, you are not quite alive, for you can never decide for yourself.
If you only live through yourself, you are never quite alive, for you have no reasons to make any decisions.
Tag: self
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In Praise of Pragmatism
Pragmatic acceptance of the facts is the only way to deal with evil. Hatred is the admission of ultimate defeat, allowing your foe to preoccupy and control you.
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Insanity
Insanity is not a sign of a broken mind – it is a side effect of normal brain function in combination with collective cultural delusions. Our brains normally function by fitting reality into the framework of our predictions. Our cultures constitute a collective framework of assumptions underlying those predictions. If our predictions override reality in a way that differs from everyone else’s, it constitutes madness.
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The art of stating the obvious
The only way to achieve the impossible is to start doing it. You may not achieve it that way, but there is no other way to achieve it.
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Arrow Slits
Arrow slits have to be narrow to protect the defenders of the castle.
Any wider and they will be exposed to dangers from outside.
Being narrow is what they are for.
I am a person who…
I see the world through the arrow slit of my self-definition.
Relevant images and metaphors draw my eye.
A living wood turns into Golgotha
with dead trees supporting crucifixions.
The fewer the parameters – the more important they become.
If all I know about myself is that I am a Christian,
I would be willing to die for it.
Or kill for it.
After all,
arrow slits are
for shooting out of. -
Entitlement
The sense of entitlement is a trap:
as you are entitled – you do nothing;
as you do nothing – you achieve nothing;
as you achieve nothing – you feel deprived of what you are entitled to. -
Canterbury tales
When age is but a litany of loss,
your life reduced to sorting through the dross
of past achievements,
when the age is grim,
the time is to become a piligrim.Pligrim-age, a chance to re-assess
priorities, to re-address the mess
of habits and regrets and to redress
the wounds inflicted on yourself and others
by you and mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers –
the loved and hated ones,
the ones who form you
and whom you shape.
The people who will mourn you
day in and out,
as you live and breathe
they mourn who you were and what is.
What might have been…
one can but disappoint
while one is living.
Death creates a point
of no return,
no future and no past.
No possibility of loss at last.
Woebegon – for woe to be gone
we stop the clock at death and then move on.Obituaries are but tales that bend
realities into the shape of stories
including start, the middle and the end
that banishes not sadness, but the worries
and when the last uncertainty is gone
piligrimage is finished.
Life is done. -
Moonscape
Perfectly circular moon seems glued to the sky.
Low, yellow, flat – like a piece of parchment.
Dry and uneven.Street lamps holding up to it fistfulls of yellow glow –
sacrificial fireflies.I feel flat, stuck to the landscape like a rough sketch.
Eclectic collage of bits held together with glue.Unmoving.
Unreal.
Unalive.
