Hope is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
—Vaclev Havel
Twice President of Czechoslovakia
Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
I certainly would not have begun, much less finished, this book if the author and subject had not become so important. It is disjointed and rambling, parts memoir and parts abstract essay, and needed a firm edit to clarify its message. Separate from all that, however, is Barack Obama’s keen insight into race, belonging, and living a meaningful life. Listening to such a brilliant and compassionate person is time well spent. Also evident is his intuitive recognition of the power of conversation to create a world and a future, a foundation distinction for executive coaching. My favorite examples:
p. 287 That’s what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried within them some central explanation of themselves. Stories full of (more…)
We do not see things as they are.
We see things as we are.
These wisdoms are for the luring of youth toward
high moral altitudes. The author did not
gather them from practice, but from
observation.
To be good is noble,
but to show others how
to be good is nobler
and no trouble.
–Mark Twain in
Following the Equator
Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.
Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet – it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System.
Stuart A. Kauffman, PhD. in
BEYOND REDUCTIONISM:
Reinventing The Sacred
Lady Macbeth’s suicide note, read by her husband:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Macbeth, the king, reacts with:
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Thanks for this interpretation is due to David Blixt.
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future.
Because unless you believe that the future can be better you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.
If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.
If you assume there is an instinct for for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world.
The choice is yours.
–Noam Chomsky
American linguist and political activist
A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.
French humanist essayist 1533-92
I was responsible for all of it. Whatever happened, I had done it to myself. One day I said, “Sandlr, you put yourself here. Nobody did anything to you. You’re here because you are.”
Receive thy new possessor
—one who brings
A mind not to be changed
by place or time.
The mind is its own place,
and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell,
a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where,
if I be still the same.
–Satan,
upon being expelled
from heaven,
in Paradise Lost Book I
John Milton
See also Werner Erhard on the Mind
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