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Sometimes we are tempted to find excuses and complain, acting as if we could only be happy if a thousand conditions were met. To some extent this is because our “technological society has succeeded in multiplying occasions of pleasure, yet has found it very difficult to engender joy”.

---Pope Francis.

The inability to sit quietly with nothing to do, nowhere to go. In times of boredom we reach out and reveal our weakness or something of our character. To drift and allow things to come to you (or not)..this, it seems to me, requires a tremendous amount of trust (in oneself, in God). And, of course, things do come-it's just that we're not ready to interpret them, or our minds have been sullied by so much false education, or our lives are full of so much self-importance, that we fail to recognize something that tilts the balance, that introduces the one thread we'd been looking for all that time.

The fusion of horizons:

There is no leap to some magical vantage point, some place-the view from nowhere-from where we can suddenly understand our actions, events, other people or ourselves; there is no ahistorical, value-neutral, timeless moment of understanding that stands independently of us. Instead, we come to an understanding-and this involves a process of listening and talking (talking in time(Lowith)). Because our time is limited, because we are finite creatures, there is no final understanding-and given our weaknesses we must accommodate for reversals as well: what we thought we knew when we were thirty can be disturbed and modified when we are forty. The tables can be turned, capstones shift...

Life (or living well) is not a science. What would it mean to say we have a science of human agency? In what sense is economics a social science since it has nothing to say about sociality and the notion of science is bunk.

I-We. Me & You.

'My heart has become receptive of every form
It is a meadow for gazelles, a monastery for monks,
An abode of idols, the Ka'ba of the pilgrim,
The tables of the Torah, the Qur'an.'

---Ibn Arabi.

You wonder what the Taleban or Boko Haram would make of this (or the right wingers in Europe who are hell-bent on portraying Islam in a negative light. Khair...

"Lord, increase me in bewilderment in You"

This is a remarkable saying (Fanny Howe pointed you to it, and anton to her). No starting point, no goal, just a circular movement around what is True.

~  ~   ~

I looked up in the mirror and caught myself thinking..a year has gone by. How swift life is...how swift Death is. The trees still stand firm, the blossoms of Spring fall as they always have. Up above, high clouds wander over us. 

A white flower grows in quietness. 

Nothing is what it was except the stone bridge.

You ask me why I am sad

I do not answer

For my thoughts are carried

like peach blossoms down a stream

Far away from the world.

--Li Po.