my mantra comes from a strokes song. is it some day? it really is my mantra. i try and practice stuff so that when it comes up it hopefully doesn’t throw me. recently, mostly playing piano. maybe it will save my life one day. maybe it already has.
it is one of the main tenets of stoicism that you are best to focus your attention on that which you can control. and that means accepting that there isn’t much you can actually control. and your body is one of the things you can’t control. it gets sleepy. it gets ill. it carries you about and it will one day kill you.
all that i can control are my character, my actions, and my reactions. my thoughts and my judgements upon others. to some extent, as much as i may worry about trump, putin and nuclear war, no good will come of it as i have no control over the outcome.
stoics also embrace the temporary nature of living. things may be how they are today. but that doesn’t mean that its justified, or will be the same in the future. i’ve only lived 4ish decades and how many atlases have i seen rendered obsolete?
my poem, the sack of london, which will be the subject of the blog next month, has been published on the edge of humanity!
please check it out! hope you enjoy.
i’m a melodramatic poet from time to time. irl and on the page. another allusion to greek tragedy: the hero from the outset carries the curse that will be his downfall. what poison, what fang, what terminal volition? dear reader, perhaps it was merely a pimple of misunderstanding.
my lover got offered a new job. this triggered many feelings, positive and negative. of course i was happy for her. but worried about the change in our lives. some jealousy too. it spurred me on a bit. i had been looking for a new position myself for a while, but i kept missing out at the final interview stage. and i was looking forward to another interview a few days hence. another disappointment it would turn out. in retrospect, i just wasn’t ready to move on. the mid life crisis was necessary and incomplete.
my mum used to always give me a row for saying ‘i was just sat there when….’ ’no,’ she would say, ‘you were sitting. earlier you sat down, then you were sitting. sat is the action,’ and i would say, ‘ok anyway so i was just sat there and then the doorbell rang so i just ignored it. and that’s why i didn’t pay the window cleaner.’
am i obsessive? maybe compared to the average person. i do love to indulge myself in my special interests. working on projects on the macbook. cycling. blogging. hoovering. sourdough bread.
the love epochal is becoming a bit of an obsession. well, i’m having fun anyway. i hope you are too.
continuing my thoughts on education and inheritance from yesterday… here is another view. perhaps the dominant view in history. by keeping people in the dark, you can better manipulate them. and this is probably why trump wants to shut down the department of education. why the right declare war on universities and academia. accuse anyone who disagree with their brand of fascism as a dangerous leftwing extremist.
demagogues stalk our polity, offering miserable, racist tidbits, with the explicit aim of preventing independent thought. resist! learn to fish!
can you teach me how to fish?
i was preparing a training session about pivot tables and data analysis generally. feeling a touch of the anxiety butterflies pre performance. and then i got to thinking about the merits of education. how each generation has a duty to pass on knowledge to the next. but does the generation coming having a duty to learn?
i feel like we are wary of talking of duties these days. we have grown up with the ideology of bourgeois individualism, the celebration of wealth and beauty, and tolerance of massive global inequality. we privatize success, and we leave the rest to struggle.
so maybe the generations coming need to learn not from the words and actions of the generations before them; but from the reality of the world they will inherit from them.
we live in a time of people who do not believe in history. we live in a time of tin-pot tyrants. the vulgar celebration of wealth. ebitda bear markets and deportations without due process.
well the stock market is jittery now as i write. is the ai book more like the dot com crash? or is our current circumstance more like the great depression of 1929? if anything, things seem worse now. we have massive poverty and excess government debt, despite the fact that the stock market still booms.
more than ever, we are polarized between a paltry class of billionaires, and a class of impecunious billions.
just because something is, does not mean it is right. we can and should change the world.
what change do you want to effect in the world?
