Author: Philo

human

Happy

Happiness is an ambiguous word like “love” or “intellect” and because of its vague nature it is often misunderstood. The irony is that we search for happiness without really knowing what it is or what it takes to be happy. Some parameters might help.

  1. Learn to differentiate from those things and people needed from those that are not and choose accordingly.
  2. Although happiness is often thought about as an emotional state, as such it will be fleeting and dependent; it will be insubstantial. Happiness must be a good in itself; it must be the end-goal.
  3. We must rid ourselves of the need to impress others. We must learn to disregard the unwarranted opinions of others, even of those we love.
  4. We must be curious and passionate about learning. we must accept the pitfalls and frustrations that come with actualizing knowledge.
  5. We must never fall prey to gadgets and toys constantly offered to us by consumerism and so-called culture. Happiness will not be found in a thing.
  6. We must do those things that make us better persons. And as we do those things we must learn that doing such sets us up to do be happy in a meaningful and substantial way.

Genius

Richard Feynman’s approach to learning is famous in some circles. What it amounts to is work. But work relies solely on the ability to focus. I recently ran across a useful definition for genius in Scott Young’s book, Ultra-Learning.

Genius: is the ability to focus intently over long periods of time.

It’s a paraphrase but the point is clear. We spend an inordinate amount of time speculating, practicing, and contriving ways to be more efficient, fast, better, in order to become better off financially. However, our ability to focus is slipping away.

The definition above puts many things into perspective. First, it reminds us that what we do is in most cases not important as how we do it. Secondly, it reminds that no matter what our goals or ambitions are they will always be determined by how we thing rather than what we think. Our greatest tool is our mind but we must be willing to use and perhaps nowadays, protect our minds.

Focus is a lifelong goal. Something that demands our time and is difficult. For those reason many will make excuses for their inability or unwillingness to do such “impractical” things. But for those of us who find value in learning we must remember:

A fool walks away in ignorance. A wise man simply walks away.

Meaning of Life

Life is not magical, but it can be.

There are black holes the size of galaxies and the universe is infinite for all intent purposes. Light years are not only measurements of time but life times, of generations. Far more living things have gone extinct than are living today.

These are thoughts that ought to be comforting if not a little unnerving. But they serve to remind us that life is so much more than a miracle. It is a gift from a watchmaker, but a blind one. The worries that we have are about us, and they are important to us, but not as important as we like to think.

And while many around us are blind as the watchmaker itself to this underlying fact does not mean that we should give up on living a life of happiness and satisfaction. In fact, being happy and satisfied is based on the acceptance that the universe is infinite and meaningless…and we are part of it.

Success!

What is success but an acceptance of being unsuccessful for long enough.

We all hear platitudes about persistence and fortitude regarding being successful but actually living this way is not easy. The other side of those sentences about success is usually “then you can get what you want.” Success is usually measured with economic value but persistence and fortitude are so much more worthy.

In fact, a good life is so much more than the latest gadget or “newest model” and so is success. Getting things is easy. Getting credit is easy. But earning things and earning credit is not. And success is directly related to earning what we have, what we actually have. If we do this long enough then we will start to realize the value of fortitude and persistence.

Being unsuccessful is not necessarily failure. In fact, failure often means the opposite of what we think of when we use the word. Failure can mean that we tried. Failure can mean that we have learned what our limitations are, at least for the moment. Failure can imply that we have tried to be better.

Those people who fail in life are often those that are curious and intelligent. And those that are successful are sometimes not.

A big house and an empty head often go together.

Age

It is a peculiar thing, age. In some ways clarifying, opening unseen pages of a book that we have forgotten. And in some ways oppressive, sucking the life-energy, the blood from our veins.

How we think about age matters long before we grow old.

In those years before age we talk of the past in terms of years and then decades, not often thinking of ourselves as young or old. We simply are, and this is good. But it would behoove us in our impetuous years to consider our own age then, and in the future.

When we are young we create our older selves.

Age comes upon us quietly and shrouds us in doubt and apathy, in fear and pain. Unmotivated to act we must draw upon our younger selves. Those times when we knew what we were capable of. When we are old we need to know our limitations. It is a different side of the same coin.

So if we know our limitations, and strive to know what we are capable of the child within will never really go away. We can live comfortably knowing we are old but believing we are young.

We can spend our old age playing like children.

The Forlorn Places

There are places in the city that are forgotten. They are passed by. Once, they were fortresses of pride and now they are empty shells. These places in the city are bastions, a haven for the weary city-dweller, busy always with the burning of time for nothing.

Be that as it may in these places one can disappear, taking a break from the endless reaching and taking. The tired dweller can take a break among the lost causes and arrogance.

I like to walk my dogs in these places. They run joyfully through the overgrown acres and through the trees and bushes once pruned and now growing freely. they pay no heed to the cement structures sitting silently among the unnatural forest.

These places are my favorite places in the city. they, in their failure, are a success. They are a peaceful bastion and I search them out. They are my secret out in the open. they are my own paradise in the endless succession of more, and more and more.

Looking for answers among a myriad of possibilities is asking questions that cannot be answered. Perhaps I’ll find answers in these forlorn places? Maybe you will too?

Bored

There is something about a sunrise. Early in the morning. It must be the light, but it seems cleansing and rejuvenating. Especially on a day free from plans. Nothing is needed. No desires and no one desires anything of you. The light, the freedom from and the freedom to. The hours ahead drip calming your head consciously.

These mornings fresh from sleep, a little drowsy, coffee in hand, before the world wakes up are the church where god is found. These minutes are void of those pesky minutia and memorandums that we so often live our lives by . Days like this are silent and still and I wait for the second coming: boredom.

But this boredom is nothing to scoff at. It is needed. It is the sky in which my mind soars. It is the sun which doesn’t burn us as we fly ever closer. It is space in which dreams are born and ideas are molded. Boredom is the topsoil that we plant our hopes in. For without boredom what are we but the mechanization of a narcissist?

Be bored and see what dreams come.

Be Curious, but Not at All Costs

The other day I was thinking of that proverbial question:

“What is my purpose in life?!”

The simple answer, I thought, is that there is no purpose “in life”. But to us human beings the answer cannot be that simple. Our choices matter, we think. We have purpose, we think. But purpose does not exist in a broader sense, but it does exist in a more narrow one. It is a useful tool to make sense of our lives. It can motivate us to find a balance.

“Be curious but not at all costs.” a voice finally said in my head, “that’s the purpose in life.”

We become capable of purpose. That purpose we are so intent on finding is always moving, as slippery as an eel. And as we try to confine it and make it conform to our wishes and desires we grow and become more intelligent, and hence more free.

Curiosity and this process of learning are key. They fit together and lead us to purpose. Our purpose is not even possible without them. So, if we need a purpose make it: to be more curious and to learn. Remember,

Life is meaningless, but it doesn’t have to be.

Those Things We Do

“You know what you’ve got.” a friend once said to me. Such a statement is not an epiphany. It is a process that takes time and understanding, understanding what is actually important rather than what we want to be important.

We all have a finite amount of time. What we do with this time is up to us. But in order to realize this takes time. It is a puzzle-play if thought about but if ignored we often find ourselves at a lost and surprised at the end of the days, weeks, and years that we’ve lived.

“Where did time go?” we might ask.

So how do we go about not wasting the precious time that we have? The things that we have should afford us the best use of our time. The things that we think we need should help us understand our time better. And we should experience as much as possible with the time that we have. All the while we think we have time but we don’t know how much time we’ve got.

The answer is fairly simple. We need to rid ourselves of those things, those acts, and those people that waste our time or are not worthy of the precious time that we have. In short,

To “know what [we’ve] got we must get rid of those things that we don’t need.

Sabotage

It’s a beautiful day and I have a cup of strong, hot, black coffee. I sit in an old chair on a private beach in northern Denmark and look out over the Baltic Sea where there sits a wooden ship, over one hundred years old. It’s a crisp, cool morning and I’m alone as as watch the beautiful shades of blues and blacks change with the waves in the sea. And then, somewhere, something bubbles up in my mind. A word.

“But…”

On such a morning, a perfect day for life, that single word breaks the sunny day like the shadow of ugly skyscraper. There is nothing hampering happiness and so my mind finds it necessary to create problems that do not exist. Battling the shadows for the sake of happiness, I chuckle a bit at the insanity and take a sip of coffee.

I think, “if you can’t be happy here, then where?!”

But that is the condition of humans. The future always looms with the unknown at its side. There is no reason for this other than a sadistic need to sabotage our own happiness whether for a day, a week or a year. Dog forbid a lifetime. And one day our life is over, years have past and we find our self on a perfect beach with strong cup of black coffee staring out over the Baltic Sea looking at a one hundred year old wooden ship. We wonder where our time has gone. And then something bubbles up in our minds. A word.

“Why!”