On Choices, by CS Lewis

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, "If you keep a lot of rules, I'll reward you, and if you don't, I'll do the other thing." I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other?

Life is like a river

"However any attempt to select out the special moments of our life may be a grave mistake. It may be that life can only be judged as a whole, in extenso, and not by its separate parts, not by taking one day and rejecting another, not by separating out the years like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, in order to conclude that this bit was very good and this bit was very bad. The fact is that everything that lives is like a river, with no shortcuts and no halts along the way." -from Obabakoak by Bernardo Atzaga

On knowing who you are, from Vaclav Havel

"Peace, solidarity and cooperation are only conceivable among people and nations who know who they are. If I don't know who I am, who I want to be, what I want to achieve, where I begin and where I end, then my relations with the people around me and the world at large will be inevitably be tense, suspicious and burdened by an inferiority complex that may go hidden behind puffed-up bravura." -Vaclav Havel, 10th Czech President, essayist and writer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel

Questioning time and technology

"If I look at the small device strapped to my wrist, the numbers, even the sweeping second hand, seem meaningless, almost ridiculous."

"There's another disadvantage to the use of the flashlight: like many other mechanical gadgets, it tends to separate a man from the world around him."

"We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are not obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase to live like men."

From Edward Abbey's 1968 book "Desert Solitaire"
http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780671695880-9

From "The Art of Pilgrimage"

"The pilgrim is a poetic traveler, one who believes that there is poetry on the road, at the heart of everything. Soulful travel is the art of finding beauty even in ruins, even in inclement weather, even in foul moods. Like poetry, pilgrimage is beyond time and space. It happens now or it doesn't happen at all."

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"To hear the pounding on the door, we have to remember to pay attention to what we have lost and what is calling for us. Not a day goes by when the world doesn't cry out for us, signal us with signs and sounds, calling us home. Listening closely is nearly a lost art, but a retrievable one. The soul thrives on it.

Words heard by chance have been known to change lives."

On opinions and myths

"For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie-- deliberate, contrived and dishonest-- but the myth-- persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought" – John F. Kennedy

From D.H. Lawrence

"However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes into us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand. And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty."

Sunday Thought

"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed- by doing nothing."
- Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach

Growing up

"Ancient peoples invented rites of passage in part to break the spell of childhood and move the initiate from the mother's lap to the lap of the world. To this day, a person must dismantle the spell of childhood or fail to find a place in life." --Michael Meade

The voice of literature

"Literature speaks with everyone individually – it is personal property that stays inside our heads. And nothing speaks to us as forcefully as a book, which expects nothing in return, other than that we think and feel."

-Herta Müller, in her banquet speech for the Nobel Prize in literature in 2009

Against Hesitation

If you stare at it long enough
the mountain becomes unclimbable.
Tally it up. How much time have you spent
waiting for the soup to cool?
Icicles hang from January gutters
only as long as they can.
Fingers pause above piano keys for the chord
that will not form. Slam them down
I say. Make music of what you can.
Some people stop at the wrong corner
and waste a dozen years hoping
for directions. I can’t be them.
Tell every girl I’ve ever known
I’m coming to break her door down,
that my teeth will clench
the simple flower I only knew
not to give . . . Ah, how long did I stand
beneath the eaves believing the storm
would stop? It never did.
And there is lightning in me still.

- Charles Rafferty

On meeting others and companionship

"We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's even worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognise each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actively realised this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy. ...As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone."

"The peace of mind one experiences on one's own, one's certainity of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another in close companionship."

Highly recommend the book from which these quotes come: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Though it is not a light read. I have gotten shit for my tendency to think and question everything in life too much. But I like it that way. It is me.

Life Logic

Reading Esquire (yes, I know it's a men's magazine) brought a few new quotes to my journal. Still recovering from the flu, I spent the day catching up on the phone and reading, only leaving the house for some Pepto, at my mom's insistence.


"Everyone has a choice of whether or not to stay young at heart or to let time erode you away like a piece of stone in the wind." -Peter Jackson

"No day-to-day mishaps or indignities can really compromise your sense of self after you've survived a deep tragedy." -Kelsey Grammer

"There is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head." -Robert McNamara


All three of these quotes are speaking to me now, as I'm finishing up my thirty-third year, entering my fourth month in Germany, transitioning to a quieter, more predictable life, discovering the underbelly of the Army, questioning again what is important.

My life seems to make sense when I look back at it. Even being here in Germany is logical. I have long been a learner, an explorer, even before I was a traveler. Moving is something I do. I derive pleasure reaching out to other beings, no matter how short the interaction. My relationships with men have been varied; none are a repeat of the last as I try them out, chance I should meet one that sticks. My friends are a cross-section of society, all ranks, colors, places, ages, political leanings. Living fully and openly, true to myself as I was in the beginning, tiny up to now, without regrets. Knowing that in the end, I have given it my all. Grasping opportunities.

Learning is my nature. Peace is my way. Living is my life.

I am grateful for this.

From my readings, "Man's Search for Meaning"

"'What you have experienced, no power on earth can take away from you.' Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind."


"Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing: the last of the human freedoms- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

- Viktor Frankl

Heartbreak

"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so it can hold ever-more wonders."

- Andrew Harvey, "The Return of the Mother"

Society and life

"That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money and then the money gives out. If you could tell them that living and spending isn't the same thing! But it's no good. If only they were educated to live instead of earn and spend, they could be happy on twenty-five shillings a week."

"He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society or fear of oneself. He was not afraid of himself. But he was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent partly-insane beast."

-DH Lawrence

Quotes from my self-appointed readings

"Better a thousand times take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want. But best of all to persist and persist and persist for ever, till one were satisfied with life."

"But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions."

-D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love