Mindfulness Moment
We can be, both at once, the most beautiful creatures on this planet, creating beautiful things, as well as the most ugly, perpetrating the ugliest actions on our kind and our home.
Another lovely sketch of Judy by penpen!
Mindfulness Moment
“Your oppression will not save you.”
I recently listened to this City Arts and Lectures interview and it’s equally moving and powerful and definitively worth a listen. The quote above (from his new book) is brought up about 39 minutes into it, and the conversation that follows masterfully expresses the linkages between the idea of hurt begetting hurt, of the two ways of dealing with hurt having been inflicted (to either create light or to turn around and inflict it on others), and how “easy” it can be to buy into the very system that caused hurt as it may be all that’s known. And how all of that is a pathway to one’s own unhappiness and ruin.
Again, the whole thing is super worth a listen.
You can't calculate orbital mechanics without pi(e)... ;)
cute and sweet by by rain1940
Mindfulness Moment
I was at the Monterey Design Conference (an in architectural design) last weekend, and I started to see this particular through line through a number of the speakers, talking about craft as compared to commodity, or craft as compared to product, or (to take it further than the topics at hand) craft as compared to content.
And at first I was by default putting each of those two things on a line – certainly not as a false dichotomy, but still as a gradient slider between the two: Craft <==> Commodity; Craft <==> Product; Craft <==> Content.
However, through a conversation with a fellow attendee I realized the oops of my default thought and came back to the distinction made by Dan Olsen in his Warcraft talk: one, these are actually on separate sliders, and two, there is still a great amount of tension between them.
In other words, they aren’t necessarily in opposed relationships but rather in complex relationships. Cranking up the non-craft slider doesn’t necessarily mean reduce craft, nor does it automatically mean that the result will be poor, though often times due to that friction and tension it most certainly greases the path towards that result. Similarly, all craft and no production might not reach the light of day.
Thus in these complex (inter-)relationships exist many possibilities for both deleterious outcomes as well as for some very favourable and even delightful outcomes.
Which is a great new window with which to view things, and also a great reminder of what I’m personally calling Dan’s Distinction of recognizing that not everything need be placed into a pure versus relationship, and that just because there is tension or friction between two things does not mean they are automatically zero-sum agents against each other.
Mindfulness Moment
Hurting others
Never alleviates our own hurt
Inflicting suffering
Never eases our own suffering
Being addicted to false outrage
Never assuages our insecurities
Keeping others down
Never brings us up
Resentment is a poison that we drink
Hoping the other will die
An improvement of everyone’s fortunes
Does not mean a reduction in our own
Focusing on the petty
Never allows us to see our commonalities