Author: Philo

human

Entropy

Entropy is a one-way street

Think about entropy seriously. Consider what it means and try to press yourself to understand the implications. It is important. It is the measure by which everything else is judged.

There is a god and it is entropy. but unlike the deistic myth, entropy does not wish to be nor does it need to be worshiped. Entropy is a cold fact. It is blind not because it cannot see but because that is its natural state. Darkness, endless, unconscious, void of all those things we have, and will lose.

Nothing we do; nothing we say or think, or feel, or believe, or wish, or want, or pray for, or understand, or beg for will change this. We are powerless and it is infinitely powerful. Entropy is unequivocal; it is unbending, and it is inevitable.

It is the meaningless driver of all things it knows nothing of. It is a cold fact that cares not to be understood. we must bow down to it but we can do it with a smile if we so choose.

Bow to no king or flag or god and accept that fate is a natural illusion.

Empathy

What is empathy but a weakness and a strength. It is a both powerless and powerful. It can stop a tank and is unable to change the violence of humanity. It is a virtue and a weapon. It is learned and intuitive. It can change you for the better and for the worse.

Empathy is a balancing act. An unempathetic animal is one that is lost. An unempathetic human animal is one that is ignorant. You cannot lose yourself in empathy nor dismiss it as unworthy. But where does empathy get its strength? Perhaps it is from the same spring as wisdom.

It is the wise man that looks mortality in the eye and realizes that nothing lasts. It is the wise man that guages respect for and of others carefully. It is the wise man that is secure and confident enough to care for others that deserve it and to know how to tell the difference.

Empathy is a worthy gift and a priceless attribute. And it must be given and received with care. it is strange that every animal other than the human one, the only one capable of the level of empathy that our intelligence gives us, deserves unlimited empathy and we must deserve it or it becomes a weakness.

Expertise

Studies have been done on expertise and one aspect is that expertise takes at least ten thousand hours in a specific field. But it takes more than that. It takes curiosity. It takes passion, a longing for that knowledge, a clear goal and the ability and willingness to learn.

Expertise takes a lifetime of ups and downs, failure, tears, frustration, lack of confidence and over confidence. It takes the fortitude to persevere. It takes a conscious effort, a clarity of mind to dismiss common and popular opinions of others that are not experts.

To be an expert takes the ability to recognize others that might be experts and to learn from them. It takes the decision to work towards that clear goal you have set in mind regularly and to pay prices no matter the cost in order to understand and delve deeper into that understanding.

You might ask yourself if you are an expert in any field. You might be but it is not for you to say. An expert lives with the knowledge of ignorance and the ignorance of knowledge.

Numb

Why bother being good at anything? Why desire integrity with an onslaught of lies and smiles? Why want to make the world a better place when the world seems to want to be worse? Why knowledge when it is ignorance that reigns?

I don’t know the answer to these questions except that i doesn’t make sense to blind yourself simply because you live in an un-seeing world. It doesn’t make sense to fuel a machine built to suck the life out of you.

Numbness is not comfort. The loss of hope is not happiness.

Societies do not progress, individuals do. People have never done anything worthwhile. Some one has. The masses are a product; the inventor is an artist. The capitalist is a parasite; the engineer a drone, and the musician a drowning man.

In the end it doesn’t matter. But what we forget is that the end doesn’t matter. It is life, a good life, that is important.

To try to do good, to produce beauty is progress. All else is a cheap trinket in a dirty convenient store.

Good Enough

This is dedicated to the feigned skepticism of those that fear happiness and its cost, who have taken the low road and call it good enough.

The judgement of others hurts. The off-handed remarks, the silent look and lack of questions and curiosity. The worlds said and unsaid. The forgone conclusions that hang in the air. But what is most irksome is that these conclusions are ignorant and ill-informed.

It is in the traditional that [these] attributes are found. Those that see the world through the lens of the past, through their own biases. Sometimes it is from those you love and care for, your parents, your spouse. sometimes from people whom you dislike or don’t know.

Sometimes it is yourself. do your own beliefs color you? Do they remind you of something bothersome? Should you fight? For what is a dream without doubt?

What is independence without ridicule?

How much is enough? Be yourself and the world will look away because it will have lost you to your own happiness.

Ignorance is a heavy burden to bear, but regret is a chain that binds you to it.

Ignorant Wisdom

There is a pervasive attitude based upon pride and a hidden weakness that undermines the ability to be great and erases the path towards it. There must be a word for it as it comes in many forms. It is found in typical places, where the weak and the prideful mingle and hover.

It is empathy gone awry. It is a bloated sense of importance concerning personal endeavors and interests. It is both humble and braggart in the same voice and is spoken with a smile or a “concerned” look. It comes from those who do not do hard work or are not accustomed to discomfort. They are blatant in their ignorance but thinks themselves wise.

They are not lazy, and so the thing is not laziness. It is not the same as the arrogance found in those familiar places. It is, perhaps, fear of the unknown and a grasping at a self-satisfactory savior. But all things are fear of death in the end, even this thing. But it is more than that. It is a fear of ego. It turns away from the unknown and despises the difficult.

The strong often bow to it because it is easier to do so than to fight. “It” is unending and blind. It turns the world beige and normalizes the lowest common denominator. It is soil in which only the genetically modified, the typical, the unspecial and spoiled can grow. This is the empty-eyed stare of the future.

Listening

The art of listening is a giving and un-egotistical activity. But, we are all somewhat egotistical by our very nature. While we know the world exists and does not revolve around us, we wish that it did; at least to an extent. This is often recognized when we talk to others. We might wait impatiently to speak rather than listening while someone else talks. We might “zone” out if we are not interested. we might notice when others do these things to us.

We all probably do this to a lesser or greater extent. We see it all of the time. Those that “check” their phones or “multitask” while someone is trying to have an intentional conversation with them. This is not listening. Listening takes work if not interest in the person if not the topic.

To listen is to be generous with our time. It is to give something precious over to someone else. To listen is to be involved in what it is to be a person rather than just a human being with an ability. We understand by listening. We learn by listening. The world is aural and as we make our way through it we can listen to the universe sing if we so choose.

It is ironic that it is noise that keeps us from listening. It is everywhere, pumped in by lost souls and those that fear truth and silence in all their forms. It is the noise of our inundated lives, of bad decisions and lost causes. These things keep us from giving our attention to others because we are lost in our own lives.

But if we listen closely through the noise and the turmoil we can hear the beauty of a single songbird, or a friend who needs a shoulder, or the laugh of someone we love. If we listen closely we can hear the silence that we’ve needed in our lives as well as learn a thing or two.

Easy

Easy is not lessening pain or misery, nor is it necessarily to help lessen unwanted chores, work or mind-numbing repetition. To lessen these things is not always easy. To have more time for leisure is not necessarily creating more time for creativity or imagination because these things are not easy. So, what is it to make something “easy”?

The first possible explanation is that it does not take much effort or understanding in order to accomplish an easy thing. A second possible explanation is that one already has the knowledge and understanding to accomplish a task. However, that does not mean that it has always been easy to that person.

In the same way technology is not necessarily progress. It does not make life creative or allow uncreative people to be creative or imaginative. Technology, however, does make life easy. This has an interesting effect.

First, it would seem to have creative and progressive effect on a few creative and imaginative folks while lessening that effect on most others. Also, it seems to create the illusion of creativity and imagination for those that are actually not creative or imaginative.

In the worst-case scenario, wisdom becomes information and creativity becomes a cut-n-paste project. In the best case scenario, technology makes it easy to further the difficult task of actually being creative and imaginative.

The Art of Conversation

We can communicate with each other. Think about that. We can share ideas and understand subtle humor. We can ponder our own existence and philosophize about the importance of life itself. We created many languages grown out of necessity and culture, and desire, and passion.

We can tell someone we love them.

Think about the times in life that we have missed doing this, that we chose not to, and instead allowed ourselves to be carried away by trinkets and blinking lights or by laziness. It is almost as if we die from a thousand unthought decisions that slowly drain our souls from our bodies.

Time is infinite but we do not have infinite time.

Our time is short and although time seems so absurd, time is all we have.

Words hold power and we hold words in our heads, at the ready. To share. We can choose to pretend and simply bide our time with meaningless chatter and we can choose Truth. We can communicate these words in so many ways. And through these many scenarios, learn ourselves, about ourselves and even from ourselves.

Words hold no value but language does.

Words are art and we must share this art as a musician must share the notes on a page. We owe it to ourselves and to others not to waste this precious art form that we come to dismiss for so many toys and trinkets. We must learn the art of conversation before we lose our way through the forest of rhetoric and the rocks of the mundane.

Become an artist and have a conversation.