meaning.......................

 We don't need to measure our notions of happiness or progress against imagined universal constants for those concepts.  They don't exist.  Even the typical notions of success change with time, context, and fashion.  We do not need to prove that our ideas of identity or purpose are watertight in some objective, evidence-based sense.  That isn't how meaning works.  Meaning is a story, and act of creation and interpretations, and for human beings meaning is at least as important as fact.

-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You

Worth remembering......................

We are the gatekeepers of our own meaning,

Humans need help, yet too many of us have accepted the idea that it's a person failing to seek it.

You can't think your way out of depression any more than you can think your way out of drowning. 

Seeking and accepting help is a skill, and it's a skill that we are not taught to value.  In fact we are taught to shun it.

I will have gained more in the looking than I lost through not finding.

-Jarod K. Anderson, a few wee excerpts from Something In The Woods Loves You

effects.........................

I have sought God in the meanings that have inspired people to live in such a way that their lives seem to point to something larger than themselves . . . It can be an affirmation, someone who gives you the confidence to be yourself.  It can be forgiveness, a way of saying, yes, you know and I know that it was wrong, but that was yesterday, and you have work to do today, and perhaps tomorrow will bring the chance to heal what you harmed.

      People with the Abrahamic monotheisms have always known that for most of us, most of the time, God, more infinite that the universe, older and younger than time, cannot be known directly.  He is known mainly through his effects, and of these the most important is his effect on human lives.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

the winding ill-lit stairway of our life...........

There is nothing wrong with referring at this point to the ineffable.  The mistake is to describe it.  Jankélévitch is right about music.  He is right that something can be meaningful, even though its meaning eludes all attempts to put it into words.  Fauré's F sharp Ballade is an example; so is the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa; so is the evening sunlight on the hill behind my house. . . . Anybody who goes through life with open mind and open heart will encounter these moments of revelation, moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words.  These moments are precious to us.  When they occur it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across an open window, through which, we catch sight of another and brighter world—a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

On being totally hosed..............

. . . learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

-from this Farnum Street post

allow..........................

      If you allow yourself to be awed by life, to keep drinking in its limitless knowledge, to keep striving for answers, to enjoy the beauty around us at every moment, to never stagnate . . . well, then you might find yourself living for a very long time, and ideally, prospering.  Or, in the absence of the longevity and self-defined prosperity you seek, you might well find meaning, or even better, happiness.

-William Shatner, as lifted from Boldly Go: Reflections On a Life of Awe and Wonder

A pretty good explanation...................

 ...........................of the concept of "Woke".

On the essence of identity............

 But when meaning has been disciplined out of language, and the pride of doing something better than other people banished, and the superficial clarity of being a man or a woman prohibited, and the practical instinct of protection and of self-protection disallowed, and life’s simple practices shamed out of existence—when all these timeless human things, all created out of the senses, melt into air, then nothing in our experience will remind us of anything else in our experience, and we will lose the ability to discriminate, to cherish, to judge. Instead of continually expanding our sympathies by helping us to follow the thread of truth through dissimilarity, the moral imagination will shrink to nothing. And then any comparison, and any equivalence, is possible.

-Lee Siegel, from this post

side effects..................

      I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.  I think what most people—especially educated, pampered  middle-class white people—consider "life problems" are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.

     It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy.  Because if you don't find that meaningful something, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.

-Mark Manson, The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*uck: A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life

Ripens..........................

 It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.

-Vincent Van Gogh

for ourselves.............................

 What the patterns of an artist's progress show is the human capacity to find meaning and to make lasting work not by planning it but by remaining open to the possibilities they see inside and around themselves.  This argues against forcing predetermined expectations and goals onto our experience of life and for an alert way of being, open to noticing and responding to the future as it emerges.   We think ourselves efficient when we squeeze our lives into schedules, itineraries, and plans, asking of apps that they tell us what to do, where to go next.  But what we lose is the freedom to notice for ourselves, to filter and reflect for ourselves, to craft our unique sense of who we are and what we wish to make of our lives.

-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

On understanding....................

      While his mind was neither quick nor facile, young Lincoln possessed singular powers of reasoning and comprehension, unflagging curiosity, and a fierce, almost irresistible, compulsion to understand the meaning of what he heard, read, or was taught.  "When I was a mere child," Lincoln later said, "I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.  I do not think I ever got angry an anything else in my life."  When he "go on the hunt for an idea" he could not sleep until he "caught it," and even then was not able to rest until he had "bounded it north and bounded it south, and bounded it east and bounded it west."

-Doris Kearns Goodwin,  Leadership: In Turbulent Times

irreducibly wild...........................

. . . Job wants justice;  God offers only awe.
     But as we read in the Book of Proverbs, the beginning of wisdom is awe.  God is going to bring Job wisdom, and to do so God has to strip Job of his anthropocentric view of reality.  God cannot be reduced to human ideas of right and wrong, just and unjust.  Creation does not run in harmony with human notions of law and order.  Creation is irreducibly wild . . . chaotic and unformed.  There is no conquering the chaos of life.  There is no avoiding the terror of merely being alive.  There is only learning how to make meaning in the madness. . . .

-Rabbi Rami Shapiro, from this essay included in Roger Walsh's The World's Greatest Wisdom:  Timeless Teachings from Religions and Philosophies

enlargeable photo and description here

Seeking........................

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

-Joseph Campbell

Writing..........................

     Kenyatta and I had been together for nine years, and during that time I had never been able to consistently contribute a significant income.  I was a writer and felt myself part of the tradition stretching back to a time when reading and writing were, for black people, the marks of rebellion.  I believed, somewhat absurdly, that they still were.  And so I derived great meaning from the work of writing.  But I could not pay the rent with "great meaning."  I could not buy groceries with "great meaning." With "great meaning" I overdrew accounts.  With "great meaning" I burned through credit cards and summoned the IRS.  Wild and unlikely schemes often appeared before me.  Maybe I should go to culinary school.  Maybe I should be a bartender.  I'd considered driving a cab.  Kenyatta had a more linear solution:  "I think you should spend more time writing."

-Ta-Nehisi Coates:  We Were Eight Years In Power:  An American Tragedy

Control................................

While you don't control external events, you retain the ability to decide how you respond to those events.  You control what every external event means to you personally.
     This means the difficulty in front of you right now.  You'll find, if you approach it right, that this trump card is plenty.

-Ryan Holiday, from today's entry in The Daily Stoic

Ryan Holiday on....................

........................................................................doing your job:

"Everything we do matters — whether it’s making smoothies to save up money or studying for the bar — even after we’ve already achieved the success we sought. Everything is a chance to do and be our best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires."

--------------------------------------------------------------

"The great psychologist Viktor Frankl, survivor of three concentration camps, found presumptuousness in the age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?” As though it is someone else’s responsibility to tell us. Instead, he said, the world is asking you that question. And it’s our job to answer with our actions.

"In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer. Our job is simply to answer well."

Talk about hard work...................

"We need the discipline to think hard about the implications of our actions."

-Seth Godin, as extracted from this blog post

A cultural barroom brawl........................

Today we drown in data, yet thirst for meaning.  That world-transforming tidal wave of information has disproportionately worsened the noise-to-signal ratio.  According to Taleb, "The more data you get, the less you know what's going on."  And the more you know, the less you trust, as the gap between reality and the authorities' claims of competence becomes impossible to ignore. . . . the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make  sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe.  By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves. . . .

Lack of certainty isn't ignorance:  it's a splinter of doubt festering in all we know, a radical disillusionment with the institutions of settled truth.  Once important effect has been a sort of cultural barroom brawl, as every question of significance becomes an irritant and source of strife between interested parties.

-Martin Gurri,  The Revolt of the Public

Different paradigms..........................

     I do not see how science and religion could be unified, or even synthesized, under any common scheme of explanation or analysis;  but I do not understand why the two enterprises should experience any conflict.  Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts.  Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values—subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.

-Stephen J. Gould, from his 1999 book, Rocks Of Ages:  Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life