Dec 10, 2022·edited Dec 11, 2022Liked by Danny Anderson
Lots to unpack! Anxiety, our value on and willingness to journey toward personal balance, how we relate to "numinous" aspects of life and "the future," our ability to navigate life's asteroid belt(s), and finally (There's always a lurking paradox), our walk through a "hall of mirrors" to love and serve. No particular order implied.
One day I ask a Jesuit mathematician how he squared a life steeped in math with his professed belief in God. He said, "God is the Future." For me, this defines Hope. The orientation serves as a foundational perspective to many challenges we humans face. Pointedly, it invites us to merge curiosity to ubiquitous anxiety. That merger allows people in combat to embrace presence of mind (the antidote to anxiety), courageously embrace curiosity and move forward.
I like the combat analogy for the perspective it brings to life's white-light, boom-boom blare of the adrenalin-fueled panic Fate delights in dealing. I stuttered through much of life - hence my acute, heart-pounding "panic cred." My experience is that intellectual isolation is artful. It isn't always useful though; and the experience often creates a destructive loop - like scratching a bleeding itch.
Ironically, it is often art that breaks the cycle, and an artist's sensitivity that allows the healing in. Kudos to you for that intellectual leap.
Guitarist/Singer Jimi Hendrix gave me this life-bridge in Axis Bold As Love: "I'm the one who has to die when it comes time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to." There's logic in living life within death's perspective. It isn't really a morbid or romantic notion. It's just a motivational framework to shine some light on our darker corners.
Balance:
Carl Orff - "Carmina Burana" (I love this)
"O Fortune,
Like the moon
You are changeable,
ever waxing and waning.
Hateful life, first oppresses,
and then soothes as fancy takes it;
poverty, and power it melts them like ice.
Fate - monstrous and empty,
you whirling wheel, you are malevolent,
well-being is in vain and always fades to nothing,
shadowed and veiled you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
To your villainy.
Fate is against me in health and virtue,
driven on and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me..."
Most of us live afloat somewhere between Orff and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Maria singing her "Sound of Music" (I won't quote it. Relax). We're responsible to keep curiosity alive, and stop digging when life tries to refill our foxhole. It's courageous to know what we know, trust Fate, relight our curiosity, embrace the numinous nature of artistic inspiration, move out and move on. People need us!
A diagnosis is not a directive is a quote I’ve stolen and apply to my own limp toward the horizon to which you point.
That's exactly where I was going with this! Thank you!
Lots to unpack! Anxiety, our value on and willingness to journey toward personal balance, how we relate to "numinous" aspects of life and "the future," our ability to navigate life's asteroid belt(s), and finally (There's always a lurking paradox), our walk through a "hall of mirrors" to love and serve. No particular order implied.
One day I ask a Jesuit mathematician how he squared a life steeped in math with his professed belief in God. He said, "God is the Future." For me, this defines Hope. The orientation serves as a foundational perspective to many challenges we humans face. Pointedly, it invites us to merge curiosity to ubiquitous anxiety. That merger allows people in combat to embrace presence of mind (the antidote to anxiety), courageously embrace curiosity and move forward.
I like the combat analogy for the perspective it brings to life's white-light, boom-boom blare of the adrenalin-fueled panic Fate delights in dealing. I stuttered through much of life - hence my acute, heart-pounding "panic cred." My experience is that intellectual isolation is artful. It isn't always useful though; and the experience often creates a destructive loop - like scratching a bleeding itch.
Ironically, it is often art that breaks the cycle, and an artist's sensitivity that allows the healing in. Kudos to you for that intellectual leap.
Guitarist/Singer Jimi Hendrix gave me this life-bridge in Axis Bold As Love: "I'm the one who has to die when it comes time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to." There's logic in living life within death's perspective. It isn't really a morbid or romantic notion. It's just a motivational framework to shine some light on our darker corners.
Balance:
Carl Orff - "Carmina Burana" (I love this)
"O Fortune,
Like the moon
You are changeable,
ever waxing and waning.
Hateful life, first oppresses,
and then soothes as fancy takes it;
poverty, and power it melts them like ice.
Fate - monstrous and empty,
you whirling wheel, you are malevolent,
well-being is in vain and always fades to nothing,
shadowed and veiled you plague me too;
now through the game
I bring my bare back
To your villainy.
Fate is against me in health and virtue,
driven on and weighted down,
always enslaved.
So at this hour without delay
pluck the vibrating strings;
since Fate strikes down the strong man,
everyone weep with me..."
Most of us live afloat somewhere between Orff and Rodgers and Hammerstein's Maria singing her "Sound of Music" (I won't quote it. Relax). We're responsible to keep curiosity alive, and stop digging when life tries to refill our foxhole. It's courageous to know what we know, trust Fate, relight our curiosity, embrace the numinous nature of artistic inspiration, move out and move on. People need us!
This was just beautiful Jack! You are a writer to the core.