anamnesis

 Speaking into the void. A black hole. Even read by a million eyes through-out history and beyond, any missive, any form of expression, communication, is only received, only processed for a flash in time and then  *poof*  it is gone from any individual mind. Only in the collective is its relevance. Visiting kin in the South while growing up I was privy to warm nights like blankets and the smell of growing earth in open fields of fireflies. Like fire flowers on the stalks of long grass. We collected them bare-foot, in jars, on magical dusks. The few captured we released, after close scrutiny. Maybe a worse for the wear. Information today reminds me of these fireflies. The best hope a burst could have would be to trigger or resonate with something larger in the psyches of the reader or viewer. Words take up with the thinking mind, but they can trigger the feeling mind and even create images or things like images. portraits maybe. we don't have the words for aggregates ...

I could totally make stories for each of these unique faces.

Bigotry is a curious impulse to make the world more like ourselves. Because of the fear of those unlike us and the fear of the unknown. We are wired to bet on safety, we are wired for life in the herd. It will take time for these instincts to encompass more than our families, our countries, religion, gender or race or even our own species, much less other indigenous life forms. We are still a primitive and precarious stage of evolution that could go either way, for both our own survival and that of much of our planet. In the long run, it may not matter, I think other intelligences are at work and it's not just up to us. I just hope we have it within our species to give our best showing before we are destroyed by our own ignorance. Nature may just write it off as a path explored, with some fatal flaws, but somehow I think we take it more personally. Which may be part of the problem.  

"In trying to improve myself, I'm always trying to find underlying principles that influence large swaths of my behavior." I read this article today, quoted above, from a friend's tweet. I've been thinking about similar themes of late. He makes a good point regarding the "long term aggregate" as a lens to look at how our day to day decisions impact both how we ended up here and now and where we may be headed in the future. Neither deferred pleasure nor immediate satisfaction but rather daily actions that reflect and demonstrate our core values, most of the time. There's an authentic part of each of us that is never fooled or impressed by words or intentions, only what it observes repeatedly in our behavior. I believe much of our self-esteem is an unconscious tally of these actions.  The note I scribbled to myself last night, that made the article particularly relevant, was this: Great goals and proclamations are lies and bullshit It's wha...

probably my most important insight with age has been this simple adage from the Dokkodo by Miyamoto Musashi, one of my greatest mentors and respected guides: "Accept Everything Just The Way It Is." and go from there. most of his other guidelines are pretty much embedded in conscience at this point...

was reading an article about choosing a "theme" for the new year instead of a set of resolutions, and also watching an Udemy course exploring Ben Franklin's thought that instead of doing the 30 days to make a new habit stuff, take a path requiring minimal will by picking 13 virtues, one per week to focus on, which cycles 4 times during the year. I liked parts of both of these and derived the following... Weekly missions of focus on one thing, but without much planning in advance. So I have the day to day of my own routines and following my established goals (like the 12 projects) , but each week will also have a particular in-depth focus that's completely independent of routines and long term goals...this beats both the superficial scattering or the long boring lock-in in favor of something completed in a week. It will be the most interesting dive I can think of doing in that span. And without predicting, week to week, what this will be, I'm having fun already ...