Category Archives: Reflection

thoughts collected after reflection, probably well after an event has occurred

Travel to…

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The Quote

If we live truly, we shall see truly. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Prompt

Not every­one wants to travel the world, but most peo­ple can iden­tify at least one place in the world they’d like to visit before they die. Where is that place for you, and what will you do to make sure you get there?

The Response

Travel has a way of open­ing me up to the truth. All the fil­ters my mind builds around the noise of life in the places I am famil­iar are gone. Once I am away from the famil­iar I can see more of real­ity again. More real­ity means more truth.

Now hav­ing the fil­ters isn’t a bad thing. I am sure there is a good rea­son we have devel­oped the abil­ity to fil­ter our inner selves the cacoph­ony of infor­ma­tion out­side our­selves. Still, open­ing past them from time to time is use­ful too. Travel does two things. I can see the world more clearly while I’m trav­el­ing and, when I return how, I am open to things I’d have fil­tered had I not trav­eled. I am sure you can think of exam­ples in your own life, what­ever kind of travel you may have experienced.

Recently I have had rea­son to think about the “before you die” ques­tions too. I have dis­cov­ered that when peo­ple are con­fronted with the truth of their own immi­nent mor­tal­ity, it isn’t some­thing else and other they want. It isn’t gen­er­ally a trip to fill-​in-​the-​blank. Instead I find they dis­cover they want more of what they already have. Perhaps I have been exposed to a unique sub­set of human­ity. I doubt it.

That all said, the ques­tion was, where in the world would I like to travel before I die? I have a long list. I’ll pick the des­ti­na­tion most impor­tant to me today. That place is north­ern Italy. I really want to take my wife to a place I know so well. I lived there, in Vicenza, for an impor­tant year as a very young man. I’d like to share a place I know so well with my dear bride. Of course, I’d love to see the place again myself too.

What will I do now to begin to make that hap­pen. I already am devel­op­ing that plan. My wife and I have begun to plan for travel in Europe in 2013. Savings, begun; plan­ning, begun; brain­storm­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties, under­way, even culling the list, started.

I feel well on my way. I hope you have some­place in mind. I hope you are well on your way too.

Us, Our Maker, and Mission

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The Quote

That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. Where is the mas­ter who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the mas­ter who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? … Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you can­not hope too much or dare too much. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Prompt

Identify one of your biggest chal­lenges at the moment (ie I don’t feel pas­sion­ate about my work) and turn it into a ques­tion (ie How can I do work I’m pas­sion­ate about?) Write it on a post-​it and put it up on your bath­room mir­ror or the back of your front door. After 48-​hours, jour­nal what answers came up for you and be sure to eval­u­ate them. Bonus: tweet or blog a photo of your post-​it.

The Response

I am sur­prised to have found another Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that I so thor­oughly dis­agree with. No, not at its heart, no where its real mean­ing lies, but it is with its sur­face that I dis­agree. It is true that you will not make a Shakespeare by study­ing Shakespeare. It is not true that you will cre­ate a great poet and play­wright in the study of Shakespeare and the appli­ca­tion of that study. I guess my heart says that we, along with our Maker, make us our selves in the space that occu­pies the gifts that the Maker has given us. If we can dis­cover how to express those gifts in the study of Shakespeare then all the bet­ter. I have read of too many authors that began in direct copy­ing of a great writer they admired. I mean word for word repro­duc­tion. After that, or as a dif­fer­ent start­ing point, many great authors copied the style of a great author. They did this pur­posely to explore anthers voice in the dis­cov­ery of their own voice, or they did this nat­u­rally and uncon­sciously as they pro­duced the moun­tains of rejected work on the path to their own great work in their own great voice.

The other prob­lem I find on the sur­face of the quote is in the ‘…do that which is assigned to you.…’ Too many of us find it too dif­fi­cult to find our own call­ing, to find what has been assigned to us to do. I find that I do not have faith that any­thing has been assigned to me to do. Perhaps that is sim­ply because I have not dis­cov­ered a mis­sion assigned to me by my Maker. Perhaps it is because I have not been assigned a par­tic­u­lar mis­sion by my Maker. Perhaps it is because I have been offered my Maker’s choice and missed, ignored, or refused it. Perhaps there is no Maker. I am uncer­tain which cause to assign to my response to this idea. It is related per­haps to my own ever present sense of being ‘in between’.

I’ll update this post with my response to the prompt in two days.

Opinion, Passion and Self

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The Quote

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opin­ion; it is easy in soli­tude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with per­fect sweet­ness the inde­pen­dence of solitude. — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-​Reliance

The Prompt

The world is pow­ered by pas­sion­ate peo­ple, pow­er­ful ideas, and fear­less action. What’s one strong belief you pos­sess that isn’t shared by your clos­est friends or fam­ily? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it?

My response to the quote

I have been feel­ing acutely lately the real­ity of this quote. I have not yet become the great man of the third sen­tence. I can­not even say that I am on a path toward that great man sta­tus. I have a fairly week sense of self today. I have opin­ions that are con­trary to the powerful’s opin­ion. Yet, Occupy Wall Street and all the Occupy Your Towns that have risen up beside it sug­gests my opin­ions are shared by oth­ers in this world.

That is sur­face. There is a deeper sense in which I wear the worlds opin­ions. It eats at me. While, at the same time, I do not know what I should be expos­ing of myself. Not here, not in this essay, but i have not found that per­sonal opin­ion within myself.

I believe I need more silence, more time in nature. More of the soli­tude of the sec­ond sen­tence of the quote. There i may find what I need to be to become great.

My response to the prompt

My strongest belief of the moment that is not really shared by those clos­est to me is a fairly small thing. That small thing comes from big things. Big ideas and the war under­way today between the classes. I’ve said enough for the moment. I will retreat back into soli­tude for a time. There I will con­tinue to steal myself for the bat­tles large and small ahead.

Too Much Information with Benjamen Walker

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Too Much Information with Benjamen Walker

Mondays 6pm — 7pm on WFMU 91.1 fm 90.1 fm wfmu​.org

Too Much Information is the sober hang­over after the dig­i­tal party has run out of memes, apps and schemes. Host Benjamen Walker finds out that, in a world where every­one over­shares the truth 140 char­ac­ters at a time, telling tales might be the most hon­est thing to do.

via Too Much Information with Benjamen Walker, TMI Podcast Feed

I have been lis­ten­ing to Benjamen Walker for a few years now, off and on. I first dis­cov­ered him dur­ing the Theory of Everything days. I love his eclec­tic mix of themes and his off beat take on the world. I never know quite what to make of what I am hear­ing. For that rea­son alone I can highly rec­om­mend his radio show to you. You can get it as a pod­cast too.

Our Character is…

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The Quote

Your gen­uine action will explain itself, and will explain your other gen­uine actions. Your con­for­mity explains noth­ing. The force of char­ac­ter is cumu­la­tive. –- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-​Reliance

The Prompt

If “the voy­age of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hun­dred tacks”, then it is more gen­uine to be present today than to recount yes­ter­days. How would you describe today using only one sen­tence? Tell today’s sen­tence to one other per­son. Repeat each day.

My response to the quote

While I have the book Self-​Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, I haven’t yet read it. This quote, like yesterday’s, needs con­text I just don’t have. I find I don’t under­stand gen­uine as the adjec­tive mod­i­fy­ing action here. “Genuine action”. How, for Ralph Waldo Emerson, is gen­uine action dif­fer­ent from action.

“Your con­for­mity explains noth­ing”, does stand on its own.

That char­ac­ter is the accu­mu­la­tion of your action makes per­fect sense to me as well. So, I guess it isn’t that I don’t have con­text for the quote. I do. I just don’t have enough con­text to dis­cover nuance here.

The sub­ject of char­ac­ter has been in the sub­text of American cul­ture for two decades now, per­haps longer. Not that I think that the pun­dits using the term today are get­ting it right. I don’t think they’re get­ting it right.

Emerson’s quote very nearly expresses a truth I believe about character.

It is my opin­ion the char­ac­ter is exter­nal. My char­ac­ter is the per­cep­tion that oth­ers have of me based upon my actions in the world that they have wit­nessed or that they have received in sto­ries about me. My sense the man’s char­ac­ter is based upon what I see him doing the world, upon the words he speaks, where he speaks them, the style with which he speaks them. My sense of a man’s char­ac­ter is based upon what I see him do or what I see him not doing.

…That Must Be Written

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The Quote

We are afraid of truth, afraid of for­tune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and per­fect persons. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Prompt

You just dis­cov­ered you have fif­teen min­utes to live.

  1. Set a timer for fif­teen minutes.
  2. Write the story that has to be written.

The Result

My response to the quote

I do not know the con­text of this quote. I fear I am at a dis­ad­van­tage. For today, I have no deep inter­nal reac­tion to the quote on its own.

Fear, so many quotes on fear. “The only thing we have to fear…” Yet, fear is such a part of human life. We carry it, per­haps, as a means of sur­vival. Yet, I think we too often fear, too much.

What a great and per­fect per­son? There are none in our age, there were none in his age, there have never been any, nor will there ever be any. Yet, there are in this age, there were in his, age there always have been and always will be per­sons, per­fect in their human­ity, in their fragility, in their fear.

My response to the prompt

Set a timer for 15 min­utes and tell the story must be told. There are no sto­ries that must be told in that sin­gu­lar way.

All of our sto­ries ought to be told. We need to tell them to each other every­day. It is by our sto­ries that we share our­selves. Because our sto­ries are our words, they are our expres­sions, they are our reac­tions, and the are our actions. Our sto­ries are the shar­ing of our lives.

The shar­ing of our lives is a gift that we give. Yet, it is also the gifts we get. A gift that is not just in the sto­ries oth­ers tell us, but in the telling of our own stories.

Our lives are not a sin­gu­lar story. Our lives are many sto­ries. Each scene is many sto­ries. Each is the source is the story that is upon the stage now. It is the story that we will tell of this time. It is the story that oth­ers will tell of this time. It is the story that we will remem­ber dif­fer­ently another time. It is the story retold by another who only heard the story of this time. It is the story that is not about this time at all. It is the story of great or sim­ple things.

So what is the story that must be told. It is the story that we can­not help but tell. That we are telling. That we will con­tinue to tell. That will be told when were gone. That is told before we arrived.