Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, Roman Emperor from 161-180:
“… the passing minute is every man’s equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. Our loss, therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come - for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? [T]he sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his.”
How does this change the way you see your moments? If you carried this as a filter for an entire day, what would be different? Do we have the tools we need to make choices in this way?
I’ve been working, since the canoe trip this summer, to refine a few of the most important pieces I’ve written about on this site. These ideas are important to me as I seek to understand both my way forward and the way I see the people I advise. Most of these ideas came out of my work with small companies and entrepreneurs but the ideas have more relevance in my life that I would have guessed.
None of these ideas are new. All of them have been written about and held to by others. I’ve only glued them together in the way that they’ve built on each other in my life.
Peerless
“A gracefully executed work has no peer.” Si-Ma of the Song Dynasty (1019-1086). If we would touch peerless, how can we find grace?
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Life bulges with banality. Quantifiers like unanimous, majority, and average somehow dominate decisions. If it’s at least above middle, then it’s worth doing.
Even vices like poker and tatoos can finally trumpet their triumph at conquering the middle-class. Yet, would these vices have become popular if they were vices first? Does exclusivity breed intrique?
Are Ughs hot because they are ugly and expensive? Is scotch interesting because there’s only a few distilleries, it’s limited to Scotland, and the good stuff costs more than your groceries? Is first class sweetest because we’ve never been there?
Isn’t there something marvelous about a consultant charging $1,650 an hour? Doesn’t the absurdity actually attract you?
Why then do we choose average when we’d rather nibble on insane? Why fight for unanimous when just one (and barely one) is where we’d rather be?
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This summer’s canoe trip was, for the most part, a fairly placid experience. Smooth water, subdued weather, genial wildlife.
But there is a stretch of river where things get pretty inspired. Rounding a corner the river suddenly picks up its pace. The shoreline dramatically changes from stately cedar to uprooted trees - root systems pawing vainly at the sky. Just below the water’s surface, ghost-like trees lie naked and white, violently strewn about the river bed.
Everything sped forward into time, like the gears of my watch had suddenly let loose. As we shot forward a waterfall began calling for us, its menacing roar growing and growing until it and several destroyed canoes, wrapped with terrifying finality around half-submerged tree trucks, sent us careening for the shore.
Those moments on the river stand in sharp contrast to the photos Geoff Manaugh posted of the Los Angeles River. It too was once a wild river. Now, 3.5 million barrels of cement later, the river has been literally paved over.
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Are we not always living
the life that we imagine
we are?
- Henry David Thoreau
From wikipedia on the Slovay Conference:
“Perhaps the most famous conference was the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, where the world’s most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. The leading figures were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Einstein, disenchanted with Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principle,’ remarked ‘God does not play dice.’ Bohr replied, ‘Einstein, stop telling God what to do.’
Seventeen of the twenty-nine attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners.”
This is related to an interest in collective intelligence. Can anyone point to other gatherings of people on the brink of brilliance?
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A fox came to visit yesterday. The first I’d ever seen outside a zoo.
A cascade of red, white, and nearly blue color - she poured down the hill. Her hair glistened, rolling with her tiny muscles.
She trotted along the fence line toward the front yard only to come back a few seconds later. Skirting the edge of the house, she walked right under my feet where I stood in the bay window overlooking the back. Her little ears twittering around, collecting sounds like children collect marbles.
This morning I see a new set of tracks. She’s been back. A new trail down the fence, a detour to the mountain ash, and back through the gap in the spruce.
Find a fox in a city and something thrilling takes bloom. It’s not just the relief of knowing we haven’t utterly gutted this place of life, it’s almost magical.
The city is so dark, faithless, and menacing. It gets easy to hide out in front of the TV worrying that evil wanders the streets. Not so, it turns out that foxes do. So do pixies, gnomes, and giant jolly slugs.
Thoreau’s prose turned to poetry:
it is only when we forget
all our learning
that we begin to know.
to conceive
with total apprehension
approach it as something
totally
strange.
if you would make acquaintance
with the ferns
forget your botany.
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