“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.” — Michel de Montaigne
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” — Sylvia Plath
I spent yesterday peddling around Essex. Along the way, I stumbled across David Whyte’s work shared by Sam Harris (here). I was stunned by David’s power. To me, too, friendship is about wandering on a wild and unexpected journey together and witnessing one another. Over to David:
“The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
My week in books
Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker. A friend this week asked me if it’s really appropriate for the Coronation to go ahead and be so lavish, given the crisis. What crisis, I thought.
Every tab tells us we’re on the brink of collapse. If we’re not already in hell, says the BBC, we are on the bus there. Politics is divided, education is failing, and our health systems are starved. Posts that get clicks and shares are full of bad news. And when we consider our context, we only remember (because of availability bias, presumably) all of the terrible stories we watch.
However, there has never been a better time to be alive. If you didn’t know your gender, race or location at birth and could pick any time in history to be born, you’d want to be delivered today. And if asked tomorrow? You’d prefer tomorrow.
Bad news has a short shelf-life. Good things take years to flourish. Imagine if the news was not published live, but once every half-century. What stories would make it in this newspaper? Indeed, mostly positive ones! The advent of the internet, the landing on the moon, the dramatic fall in the number of people living in extreme poverty, and the doubling of life expectancy. Better still, we’re still at the beginning of this human journey.
“But it’s in the nature of progress that it erases its tracks, and its champions fixate on the remaining injustices and forget how far we have come.”
This is absolutely one of my favourite books; recommended.
Live well,
Hector