Having To Do With How To Be

March 15, 2025

Another benefit of living a minimalist lifestyle, is that when you have a “Why did I come in here?” moment, a quick glance around the room usually solves the mystery.

February 5, 2025

I seem to have made myself a special day for having just read Letters to a Young Poet. Full of wisdom and thought provoking ideas on art and the nature/benefits of solitude. Also unexpected expositions on sex and sexuality.

Loved The Letter from the Young Worker which ends the book. The idea (if you are inclined toward the divine) that one should not let Christianity separate you from God.

February 3, 2025

Perhaps life really is a to-do list with only one checkbox.

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”

~ John Steinbeck, East of Eden

January 26, 2025

I had a “How I quit worrying and learned to love the bomb” moment last night. Better now, back to my usual level of worrying. Still ready to resist.