It has always been the individual who calls the group to a larger vision, who insists on compassion and fair play. When the goal of the group ceases to be the individual, that group goes into decline.”
The Sun Magazine
Time is the essence, time is the season, time ain’t no reason, got no time to slow. Burn out the day, burn out the night, I can’t see no reason to put up a fight. I’m livin’ for givin’ the devil his due.”
Blue Öyster Cult
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
Chess skills are most helpful when you are playing chess. However, when you climb & jump on rocks, your entire brain & body are put to work.
The board & pieces are all the material, but the METAGAME dynamic is certainly a factor in competition. The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig is about losing the battle to a weaker player who uses a novel psychology.
That’s me at the board, on the right, maybe 20 years ago.
There are furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks.
Here they sat at a social breakfast table–all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes–looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains.
Chapter 5: Breakfast – Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Coffee drinking in the morning is what makes getting up in the morning such a pleasure, makes life worth living. And coffee gets one moving, and you know: moving is good for you.
Forge your own path, trust in the magic of individuality.
Though the methods vary, the mission is the same: to realize that we are all of us temporary & fragile beings.
Shot here from who knows where, bound for who can tell, we can love ourselves and each other while we’re here.
Elizabeth Berg
Hunger is the first element of self-discipline.
If you can control what you eat & drink, you can control everything else.
health • impact • joy • love
vocation • wealth • wisdom
WORDS are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
–LORD BYRON