DAILY PHOTO: Saqsaywaman Wall
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PROMPT: People
Daily writing prompt
What’s a moment when a stranger completely restored your faith in people?
I will admit that I’m quite jaded, but the only place I need my faith in people COMPLETELY restored is online. Almost anytime I interact with real people in the real world I come away with a sense that people are generally good and mostly trying to do right (in as much as they can determine what “good” and “right” mean in our complicated world.) However, as soon as one allows for anonymity, shittiness blossoms — whether that anonymity is due to the nature of the online world or because one is otherwise not interacting face-to-face or because one (while not strictly anonymous) is homogenized by life inside an echo chamber.
Huh, maybe I do need my faith in people restored because I guess I’m saying that people in the light of day are loveable but in the dark they slouch toward depravity. Maybe we’ll figure it out. For most of humanity’s existence, anonymity was not an option. There’s no hiding in a tribe. It’s all part of what our species is working out, I suppose. I suspect that most people if given the choice between having the ill-gotten gains of their anonymity or being truly and deeply seen would opt for the latter.
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Shadow-dappled [Haiku]
shadow-dappled
forest floor stretches to a
confusion of trees.
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DAILY PHOTO: Lapu-Lapu, Rizal Park
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PROMPT: Future Self
Daily writing prompt
If your future self could send you one sentence, what do you hope it would say?
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure we die in a reasonably robust mental and physical state.”
I don’t want my future self to get comfortable with the idea of pooping ourself in bed or forgetting the few people we know just because he’s gotten more cowardly about death in its proximity.
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DAILY PHOTO: Qatari Ministry of the Interior
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PROMPT: Best
I’m not big on tabulating the “best” this or that. It feels like it hamstrings experience and puts one in a comparison mode in which one is always living half in the past. If it looks good, eat it, and then move on to the next experience — giving that experience your presence.
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DAILY PHOTO: Bridges of Jurong Lake Gardens, Singapore
PROMPT: Schools
It’d be nice if schools taught people how to NOT be docile, unquestioning worker-bees.
One can come through today’s education system with a PhD without emotional intelligence, self-confidence (beyond one’s silo,) a capacity to think soundly about a range of topics outside one’s discipline such that one recognizes potential unintended consequences and counter-intuitive influences, with an intolerance of competing worldviews, and with a lack of humility about what one knows and what humanity as a whole knows.
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Stone Bridge [Haiku]
in the forest,
an old stone bridge;
the sole work of man.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 