Yesterday was their 36th wedding anniversary. I admire them a lot for this. Commitment can be rough sometimes. And I imagine it hasn’t always been easy.
An older friend once told me how marriages don’t just have good days and bad days but good years and bad years. What a thought.
Cartels effectively control about 1/4 of Mexican territory, according to US reports, and politicians running for office are routinely targeted and sometimes assassinated.
Hopefully this President is more aggressive about dealing with the problem.
Some references:
In a college course a long time ago, I wrote a paper on orangutans. They are the smartest primates, aside from humans. They can watch humans and use tools (washing clothes, cutting, sawing, hammering, etc) and have even been known to use tools to get out of their cages. Their main limitation with tools is that they cannot make the tools. Apparently, they can even recognize themselves in mirrors.
I was wondering about this question today: should we worry about another global ice age? For a few million years, there have been regular ice ages, about every 100,000 years. Incidentally, a few factors mean that we may not see another for a long time, a delay to this normal process. As it turns out, man-made global warming might actually be delaying the onset of another ice age. And while, certainly, there are many other negative impacts today of this process, this particular effect hadn’t occurred to me. In a weird way, humans have lived so as to make the earth more hospitable for themselves (in at least this one way).
(Well, technically, we’re in an ice age, but in ice ages there are glacial and interglacial periods, and we’re in an interglacial period, with glacial periods being the much colder periods we normally associate with the term ice age.)
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/will-there-be-another-ice-age
Jurgen Habermas, famed critical theorist and German sociologist once said that the Enlightenment may not have happened without coffee…and Voltaire is rumored to have had dozens of cups himself per day…
2 billion consumed per day today…
Still, I think there was something social about alternative 90s music…
Part grunge, part surfer rock, part kick ass tough woman, part fanciful romance, part skater punk kid…
And this bums me out…
Money is nice, but having time to relax and do nothing is nice.
What a perennial trade-off: either having money and little time in which to spend it or having plenty of time and less money to spend during that time.
But as I age, I can’t help but want to stow more money away…as much as possible…
(Although I love art and music…just only so many hours in the day)
Some days, you go somewhere and realize that you’re bringing up the average age of the group pretty significantly…and that’s a sign that mayyybbbee it’s not the place for you to be…
What is purpose? What is it to have a purpose, to find one’s purpose? To lose one’s purpose, or to gain it again?
I think these questions are perennial for human beings: part of being human (as Heidegger talks about) is having a sense of our purpose in the world as it relates to the physical and social world of which we are a part.
Purpose is funny though: it is sort of tangible but also sort of not. Being a rocket scientist requires access to scientific technology and books and classes and etc but is not limited to those things (they are like tools in a way).
Where does purpose come from though, an individual’s purpose? I think this question is pretty elusive but also very basic and ready-to-hand. I think we all have some sense of our purpose day-to-day. Being someone into music, being a sister or a brother, an artist, engineer, philosopher, farmer. But the discovering of one’s purpose can be a challenge.
In our world, we are inundanted with nearly-infinite possible purposes: on tv, on youtube, online, etc. We see all kinds of people doing all sorts of things, and it is easy to lose ourselves in the stream of the social.
Being by and with one self can help us find our specific purpose, I think. Having time alone and with our thoughts, feelings, impulses, desires. Learning who we are, investigating ourselves, learning what drives us and what is worth giving ourselves, our energy and our time to.
Purpose is also funny in that we can find, then forget it, then find it again. Then lose it. Or it changes. I have been a substitute teacher, thought about teaching for a bit but then realized that the profession would not give me all I wanted in a profession. Now, with Social Work, I enjoy the work but I find myself coming up against its limits, seeing things I would like to do or want to do but unable to do given what I am required to do as a Social Worker. This is what is so interesting about living in and being a part of the world, as Heidegger explores: living and existing is a process, not an endpoint or goal.
Learning who we are is about trying things, seeing what works and what doesn’t and exploring what our existence means in the larger social and physical world. I remember being frustrated by people who seemed to have a perfect understanding of how they wanted to be when I was younger. Many of them turned out to be just as unsure as me but less honest with themselves about that (although some of them also turned out to do very well in whatever profession they chose). Fortunately, life is both short and long, and we have time to take up again what purpose we feel we may not have already realized: there is so much time left still.
Another comment on purpose that relates to my oft-quoted favorite philosopher Hannah Arendt. In her work, she specifies one area of human activity as fabricating: it is the building of things that will outlive us: like a song, a building, a law, some kind of edifice. In some sense, a purpose is about creating a thing will outlive us, an impression we want to have on the world that will be there even when we are not, building something we will leave behind…
Then again, maybe it is nice to just to relax too, and enjoy the day as it passes…
(The painting has no discernible relation to the topic, but I just like it)
Bearer of Pity 