Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Leo Tolstoy on Kindness, and the Measure of Love
[copied from brainpickings.org, by Maria Popova]
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now,” Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful letter to his first wife and lifelong friend. Somehow, despite our sincerest intentions, we repeatedly fall short of this earthly divinity, so readily available yet so easily elusive. And yet in our culture, it has been aptly observed, “we are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.” In his stirring Syracuse commencement address, George Saunders confessed with unsentimental ruefulness: “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” I doubt any decent person, upon candid reflection, would rank any other species of regret higher. To be human is to leap toward our highest moral potentialities, only to trip over the foibled actualities of our reflexive patterns. To be a good human is to keep leaping anyway.
In the middle of his fifty-fifth year, Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 20, 1910) set out to construct a reliable springboard for these moral leaps by compiling “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people,” whose wisdom “gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness” — thinkers and spiritual leaders who have shed light on what is most important in living a rewarding and meaningful life. Such a book, Tolstoy envisioned, would tell a person “about the Good Way of Life.” He spent the next seventeen years on the project.
In 1902, by then seriously ill and facing his own mortality, Tolstoy finally completed the manuscript under the working title A Wise Thought for Every Day. It was published two years later, in Russian, but it took nearly a century for the first English translation, by Peter Sekirin, to appear: A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts (public library). For each day of the year, Tolstoy had selected several quotes by great thinkers around a particular theme, then contributed his own thoughts on the subject, with kindness as the pillar of the book’s moral sensibility.
Perhaps prompted by the creaturely severity and the clenching of heart induced by winter’s coldest, darkest days, or perhaps by the renewed resolve for moral betterment with which we face each new year, he writes in the entry for January 7:
The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.
Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.
At the end of the month, in a sentiment Carl Sagan would come to echo in his lovely invitation to meet ignorance with kindness, Tolstoy writes:
You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.
In the entry for February 3, he revisits the subject:
Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.
After copying out two kindness-related quotations from Jeremy Bentham (“A person becomes happy to the same extent to which he or she gives happiness to other people.”) and John Ruskin (“The will of God for us is to live in happiness and to take an interest in the lives of others.”), Tolstoy adds:
Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now,” Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful letter to his first wife and lifelong friend. Somehow, despite our sincerest intentions, we repeatedly fall short of this earthly divinity, so readily available yet so easily elusive. And yet in our culture, it has been aptly observed, “we are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.” In his stirring Syracuse commencement address, George Saunders confessed with unsentimental ruefulness: “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” I doubt any decent person, upon candid reflection, would rank any other species of regret higher. To be human is to leap toward our highest moral potentialities, only to trip over the foibled actualities of our reflexive patterns. To be a good human is to keep leaping anyway.
In the middle of his fifty-fifth year, Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828–November 20, 1910) set out to construct a reliable springboard for these moral leaps by compiling “a wise thought for every day of the year, from the greatest philosophers of all times and all people,” whose wisdom “gives one great inner force, calmness, and happiness” — thinkers and spiritual leaders who have shed light on what is most important in living a rewarding and meaningful life. Such a book, Tolstoy envisioned, would tell a person “about the Good Way of Life.” He spent the next seventeen years on the project.
In 1902, by then seriously ill and facing his own mortality, Tolstoy finally completed the manuscript under the working title A Wise Thought for Every Day. It was published two years later, in Russian, but it took nearly a century for the first English translation, by Peter Sekirin, to appear: A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts (public library). For each day of the year, Tolstoy had selected several quotes by great thinkers around a particular theme, then contributed his own thoughts on the subject, with kindness as the pillar of the book’s moral sensibility.
Perhaps prompted by the creaturely severity and the clenching of heart induced by winter’s coldest, darkest days, or perhaps by the renewed resolve for moral betterment with which we face each new year, he writes in the entry for January 7:
The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.
Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.
At the end of the month, in a sentiment Carl Sagan would come to echo in his lovely invitation to meet ignorance with kindness, Tolstoy writes:
You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.
In the entry for February 3, he revisits the subject:
Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.
After copying out two kindness-related quotations from Jeremy Bentham (“A person becomes happy to the same extent to which he or she gives happiness to other people.”) and John Ruskin (“The will of God for us is to live in happiness and to take an interest in the lives of others.”), Tolstoy adds:
Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.
Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
Friday, July 26, 2019
Allman Brothers (Eat a Peach), etc., to the wrong enemy
The fires are burning in another land
Don't start counting, don't start counting
Colder and colder, the ice is moving closer
And it gets me down
Going round and round and down the same old track
Pack on my back, going swiftly nowhere
Heart in my ear beating like a drum
Where will you go?
All by yourself
(Hah ... hah ... hah ... hah ... hah ... hah)
And now I'm standing on the corner
Waiting in the rain
But then in sunlight without warning
I invent a name
Me and Sarah Jane
We had a special thing going
Me and Sarah Jane
It was a time of love and laughter
It wouldn't come again
We had our round of joy but after
Then began the pain
Me and Sarah Jane
We had a special thing going
Me and Sarah Jane
Sarah Jane
Searching for a clue
Traces on the sand
First I'm flying, going round round round
Then I'm sliding going down down down
Doesn't matter where I start I always end up
Crawling through those same old crowded rooms
Me and Sarah Jane
We had it coming
All the pain
Walking down the streets
And finding nothing is the same
And now the city lights are dimming one by one
It costs too much money to keep them all on
Me and Sarah Jane
In silence walk along the shore
Tears of joy and mocking laughter
Words lost in the wind
The tide was rising
But there we stayed
We had no fear of dying
We weren't afraid
[One fights the wrong enemy. The enemy is in one's own mind. The enemy is within.]
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
Stevie Wonder "As" (2008)
2:47-3:03: I find these spoken words highly relevant to getting though life respectfully, graciously, beautifully - while in fellowship with others - not true?
[I share this clip every year, usually around late July. I can't see any reason why Today shouldn't be that day - eh?]
[I share this clip every year, usually around late July. I can't see any reason why Today shouldn't be that day - eh?]
Thursday, July 4, 2019
Monday, July 1, 2019
I can become able to do this thing
I can become able to be a better person - yes?
Do I want this - for Self and family, friends, contacts?
Will I become progressively able to do this - with a commitment, followed by real effort, to taking/making this so-called righteous path?
[And now I turn this around and ask YOU the same questions.]
P.S. This missive used to be entitled "You can become able to do this thing" - until I turned it around. ;-)
Do I want this - for Self and family, friends, contacts?
Will I become progressively able to do this - with a commitment, followed by real effort, to taking/making this so-called righteous path?
[And now I turn this around and ask YOU the same questions.]
P.S. This missive used to be entitled "You can become able to do this thing" - until I turned it around. ;-)
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