Most people live as if they believe their lives have meaning and purpose, but if pressed, they either deny or can’t articulate a real basis for that belief.
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Be Like Justin
So now you’ll have a couch to jump on while you listen to Great Big Sea. What more could anyone need, eh?
Our World Needs G.K.C.
“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.” GKC
On Les Mis, Suffering, & My Almost-Adult Daughter
We had to become—at least partially—an answer to our own prayer. It was terrifying, exhausting, and maddening.
Stop. Look. Remember.
What if we order our lives around rhythms and practices and habits that foster depth and make us more human?
OLD BOOKS, Part IV: On Moral Fiction, by John Gardner
“[W]e begin to praise writers themselves for their oddity, not for their wisdom, universality, or even art.”
OLD BOOKS, Part III: Standing by Words, by Wendell Berry
“When mind predominates…then the individual is ‘liberated’; all his or her wants and wishes are made equal to any other wants and wishes and assume the status of legitimate values or goals. The usefulness of this state of affairs to an economy based on consumption is obvious.”
Return of Joy
But a more noticeable and fuller joy is returning, and it is unexpected and delightful.
OLD BOOKS, Part II: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, by E. F. Schumacher
“Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the wellbeing of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic,’ you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.”
OLD BOOKS, Part I: The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz
“Still we lived; and since we were writers, we tried to write. True, from time to time one of us dropped out, shipped off to a concentration camp or shot. There was no help for this. We were like people marooned on a dissolving floe of ice; we dared not think of the moment when it would melt away.”