Hi Hi,
I’ve been pretty sick the past two weeks and along with taking off work have taken off Daily Humanist. I am also probably going to be leaving town in a few days for a family emergency. When it rains, it pours! I’ll be back when things settle down a little.
Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.
–Ray Bradbury, 1973
Response: The most basic questions of our life are the most complicated to answer. It is up to each of us to find our own path to the answers that we seek and try to embrace the mysteries of the world. For me, mysteries are both frustrating and freeing. We don’t have to know the answer if we let ourselves wonder.
All poetry is supposed to be instructive but in an unnoticeable manner; it is supposed to make us aware of what it would be valuable to instruct ourselves in; we must deduce the lesson on our own, just as with life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1825)
Response: We are responsible from learning from our own life. Others can instruct us, direct us or lead us places but ultimately we must be open to it. Our lives don’t have preset lessons or purpose, we make that.
My life has been busy lately and I haven’t been able to update the daily humanist as often I would like. I am going to keep trying to do it everyday during the week but I may miss a few days here and there.
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Dreams
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
–Langston Hughes
Response: Dreams carry us forward into the ideal future. But our dreams don’t just tell us where we want to go, but where we are now. They shape our present attitude of life and that way through looking to the future we make today. How do you keep your dreams alive?
What is … important is that we — number one: Learn to live with each other. Number two: try to bring out the best in each other. The best from the best, and the best from those who, perhaps, might not have the same endowment. And so this bespeaks an entirely different philosophy — a different way of life — a different kind of relationship — where the object is not to put down the other, but to raise up the other.
–Jonas Salk, The Open Mind interview (1985)
Response: When there are limited resources it seems like humans spiral into competitiveness. How do we move past this conundrum? How can we create a space where people do things with others not against them? How would we even start to approach this “different way of life” if there are indeed limited resources for a few?
I believe in human beings, but my faith is without sentimentality. I know that in environments of uncertainty, fear, and hunger, the human being is dwarfed and shaped without his being aware of it, just as the plant struggling under a stone does not know its own condition. Only when the stone is removed can it spring up freely into the light. But the power to spring up is inherent, and only death puts an end to it. I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.
Pearl S. Buck, This I Believe (1951)
Response: Believing in humans is the basic tenet of humanism and I believe in humans. I believe in the diversity of humanity and out ability to be good despite our overwhelming circumstances. We are creative, destructive, hardworking and lazy. We are complicated and confusing creatures, perfect in our flaws.
No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.
— Amelia Earhart
Response: Our actions echo out into society. If we act kind and genuine, we make our world a better place. An act of kindness does not necessarily mean gifts or consumption, like we are often shown, but through small actions and gentle words. How can you introduce more kindness into your daily routine?
Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small “I”s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, “I”. And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion.
–G. I. Gurdjieff, In Search Of The Miraculous (1949)
Response: One of the basic questions of our lives is: Who am I? We experience life only through our own life’s prism, and so, even as much as we know others, we can only truly know ourselves. But how much do we know ourselves? People are inconsistent and always changing. We say, “I would never do that…” but then we do. Some people would call this weakness, but I call it human.
“How infinitely superior to our physical senses are those of the mind! The spiritual eye sees not only rivers of water but of air. It sees the crystals of the rock in rapid sympathetic motion, giving enthusiastic obedience to the sun’s rays, then sinking back to rest in the night. The whole world is in motion to the center. So also sounds. We hear only woodpeckers and squirrels and the rush of turbulent streams. But imagination gives us the sweet music of tiniest insect wings, enables us to hear, all around the world, the vibration of every needle, the waving of every bole and branch, the sound of stars in circulation like particles in the blood. The Sierra canyons are full of avalanche debris – we hear them boom again, and we read the past sounds from present conditions. Again we hear the earthquake rock-falls. Imagination is usually regarded as a synonym for the unreal. Yet is true imagination healthful and real, no more likely to mislead than the coarse senses. Indeed, the power of imagination makes us infinite.”
–John Muir, “The National Parks and Forest Reservations” (1896)
Response: Not much to say today, except that where I live is beautiful and sunny. I think that in enjoying the beauty of humanity, we find it innately intertwined with nature.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
–Semisonic, Closing Time (1999)
Response: Today is the last day of the class that I teach. My life is punctuated by beginnings and ends and it is always kind of sad to say goodbye to the students, let go of my teaching and prepare to begin anew. And yet, I also look forward, like my students, to the change in pace. I get to focus these next few months on my “own” work (as though teaching is something separate from that). The semester ends, but the farmer’s market opens, the days grow bolder, and I get to begin again.
Daily Humanist 