My wife, movement, new & interesting ideas, play, and epiphanies.
[I’m presuming we’re using the word “thing” in the broadest possible sense — as a stand in for any noun. If it is meant in the narrower common usage of trinkets, gewgaws, baubles, and tchotchkes, then I’ve got nothing.]
A psychology teacher taught us about what he called “the gestalt of expectations.” It’s when one builds an alternative reality in one’s mind (typically a worst-case scenario) and then one acts as though it is a reality, when – in fact – it is not. (Though sometimes it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy situation, which — of course — triggers selection bias in people of the unexamined life.)
It was my introduction to what I would come to know as the most fundamental insight of human existence — i.e. that one’s experience of the world is not the world itself, and while one has minimal influence over the latter, one can have tremendous influence over the former. One can even train oneself to perceive difficulties and sorrows as learning and growth opportunities.
Daily practice of feeling gratitude. (As opposed to being grateful that one November day a year and wallowing in how horrible everything is the other three-sixty-four.)
In the Flow.
If plays count as books, then most of Shakespeare’s plays. I’ve already reread a number of them (e.g. Hamlet, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)
I’ve read Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a couple times in full (and segments of it many times over) and expect to get to it again. I’ve read Voltaire’s Candide a couple times.
I could definitely see rereading Journey to the West, Water Margin, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but at this point I’m hoping my Mandarin will get good enough to read them in Simplified Chinese.
I’ve read a number of nonfiction texts multiple times — e.g. Sunzi’s Art of War, Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, Laozi’s Dao De Jing, and Emerson’s Selected Essays.
I’m generally not a fan of rereading books because there is so much awesome stuff out there to be read a first time. For all the reading I’ve done, there is still a massive number of classics that I have yet to touch. Usually there has to be a good reason for a reread, e.g. a new translation that promises to be improved / simplified, the book is just so potent as to still have lessons packed in after the first read, it’s a challenging read and the first go leaves a lot on the table, or — like The Little Prince — its enjoyment-to-time investment ratio is high.
Wu Song (武松) from Water Margin (水浒传.)
Because he’s a traveler with zero f#&ks to give. There is no more freedom to be had than that.
Best: Dogs and Cats
Worst: Hippopotami, African Elephants, the Black Mamba, Right Whales, Pumas, Condors, Puffer Fish, Howler Monkeys, Rhinoceroses, Hammerhead Sharks, Lowland Gorillas, Geese, Cape Buffalo, Galapagos Tortoise, Bengal Tigers, Pronghorn Antelope… , and anything else that some jackass builds a house-sized chain-link fence cage in his backyard to “keep.”
To pick nits, I think the defining characteristic of a job is that one earns money for one’s time and effort. Otherwise, it’s volunteering or a hobby — both of which are fine activities in which I’ve participated over the years — but they’re not “jobs.” In the case of a hobby, one should do it because one loves it and / or gains from it. In the case of volunteering, if you’re doing the work only because you love the activity, you’ve probably missed the point of the undertaking.
Curling. I don’t know why. By all logic, it should be boring as hell, but – somehow – it’s like a slow-motion train wreck, and I can’t take my eyes off it.
That’s a tough one because while I see value in communities, I’m also concerned that there is a rising trend toward tribalism and nationalism that will not be good for anyone — not to mention a shift toward virtual communities where anonymity and disconnect lead to people to act as though they were raised by hyenas. (I do know that, in reality, that’s an insult to the marvelous hyena, but I think it makes a sort of point for the non-hyena expert.)
I’ve been amazed at how India manages to have an intense sense of community in such a vastly super-tribal environment. (I’m using “supertribe” in Desmond Morris’s sense — i.e. a community which is too big for everyone to know everyone else, and which has a group dynamic that reflects that fact.) But it’s not as though there isn’t a dark side to this intensity of community — patriarchy, sectarian conflict, disempowered societal segments, etc.
America, by comparison seems to be experiencing a dearth of true community, which is driving people toward virtual “communities,” and in virtual communities people seem to fall into the shittiest versions of themselves. Not to mention the lack of community’s contribution to what I’ve heard called a “mental health crisis.”
I guess my preferences would be that community be: 1.) real and not virtual. 2.) that it exploit the advantages of diverse membership instead of wallowing in homogeneity and group think. 3.) that it doesn’t create overclasses and underclasses. And that, 4.) Community norms minimally negate individual freedoms.
That said, I’m not at all sure that the above criteria can be reconciled. Maybe the tradeoffs are too strong. Maybe – in our super-tribal world – the closest-knit society will always be the most xenophobic [fearful / disliking of outsiders,] and maybe tolerance and egalitarianism will always be accompanied by societal degradation. I have observed a strong inclination for people to think of compassion as a zero-sum game.
As I said, a tough one.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 