Posts
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Role Models
When we open the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius we notice that he starts by listing his role models. Here are the first lines of book one:
From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.
From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character.
From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.
From my great-grandfather, not to have frequented public schools, and to have had good teachers at home, and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally.
From my governor, to be neither of the green nor of the blue party at the games in the Circus, nor a partizan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators’ fights; from him too I learned endurance of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people’s affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.
And he goes on like this for a long time. He lists his role models, but he of course also lists good qualities worth having as a human being.
I also do this from time to time. I think it’s a very good practice.
We can sit down and think about the people we know. Friends or family, neighbors or coworkers.. Just sit down and think about their good qualities. It’s a very nice way to appreciate them and be thankful for having them in our lives. It feels good to do it. (Try it!)
And it is also quite useful if we do not like a person that much.
Or when we feel envious.
Let’s say a friend of us becomes very wealthy. Sadly, as humans, we usually can’t help it and we compare ourselves to our peers. We automatically feel lowered in status. We may feel that we have less ability because we are less successful. I mean it’s official now, isn’t it. We start feeling envy and then we start looking for reasons why this person is not so great. For instance we might think: “He just got lucky.”
But that’s a very unconstructive way to approach such feelings.
Instead, we could first realize that this person has some qualities that made them our friend. And we could then try to recognize that he has some qualities that made him succeed. We could find those qualities and maybe make a list of them in the privacy of our mind. And be happy we that have someone like him in our lives. Someone who is our teacher simply by embodying these qualities.
Then the envy disappears and we wish him well. And, if we wish to, we are now free to try to be more like him. In other words: We open ourselves up to grow. And it becomes more likely that we will embody these qualities in the future, too.
Wow I am super tired. I should be in bed now. I will not be surprised if I read this again tomorrow and it’s full of errors. But whatever, I’m posting it.
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The Great Pause
Once again, this a little short story. Just for practice..
It was 8PM when I left the office. It was raining a little, but I didn’t long for an umbrella. The air smelled nice and it was rather warm. The traffic was bad though. In the evenings I needed to cross the busy street to reach my bus stop.
However, as I waited at the crosswalk for the green light, the lights suddenly went dark. All of them. A city wide power outage it seemed.
“What took them so long?”, a voice asked next to me.
I turned and saw a rather small woman, about 20 years my senior.
“Yes”, I agreed.
I, too, had expected civilization to break down sooner. The virus was spreading quickly.
It was nice how everything suddenly looked however. It was dark. All the lights went off. Well, all the lights except the lamps of the cars and because there were so many it was substantial. But all the streetlights were dark. And the buildings. Except one, a few blocks down the street. That was the hospital. It must have switched to backup power. I heard they built them with generators in the basement.
“Wait until the rain stops.”, the woman said, “We’ll see all the stars of the Milky Way.”
It wasn’t clear at all that the rain would stop any time soon. But it was clear that the electricity would not be coming back. As a matter of fact, it would take about three months.
Three months, because that’s how long they said it would take for everthing to return to normal. First it would take two months to infect virtually everyone. It spread so easily.. Apart from walking around in hazmat suits all the time, there was little that we could do. And that’s not feasible except for a few hundred thousand. The doctors and the people in food supply. The rest of us, I included, would get the illness.
And then it would last for about 4 weeks.
We assumed we would not die. Not from the virus directly, anyway, but perhaps some effects of The Great Pause would get us. Thankfully, we weren’t worried about violence. We hardly gave any hazmat suits to policemen and soldiers. Becuase the virus did mainly one thing: It made us care less, or more correctly: It made us care not.
We simply could not be bothered to do anything at all. Some chemicals in our brain or god knows where were altered, and our motivation sank to zero. It was so absurd it would be funny. But who would care to write any jokes about it? You just sat around and drooled and, from time to time, you would get very hungry. And then you would eat a lot and then you would fall back to lethargy. I heard watching TV was still ok, as long as someone turned on the TV for you.
Well, TV was over, for now. It looked like the last people who kept the power grid running stopped caring. That meant three months without power for all of us. If they started doing their jobs in four weeks, they would still have to fight with the fact that most of the others that they relied on weren’t doing anything yet. Cable fixers for example. Or Gas suppliers. Or whoever else is needed to make the lights go on again.
Even for the uninfected no electricity meant no office, it meant no Internet and it meant no work. At least the government had been smart enough to ensure the food supply. We trusted we would be getting our rations at the grocery stores as announced. From the designated people with the hazmat suits. Fun fact: They would even bring it to your home, in case you couldn’t be bothered to pick it up.
“Well, good luck.”, the woman said and crossed the street. At this point the traffic had stopped moving. What a congestion.. I also crossed, keeping eye contact with the drivers. With my dark jacket and without the street lamps I wasn’t exactly super visible.
I walked home. I was looking forward to watching the stars. I thought she’s right. The Milky Way would be specacular. And one month of doing nothing sounded great, too. Sure, there’d be some stuff to figure out, but all in all we would be doing things when the sun was up and going to bed when it wasn’t.
I walked underneath a bridge and on this side there was a wall which was full of posters. It were posters informing about concerts, theatre performances and some of them called for social change. You wouldn’t believe what was going on in Pakistan. That sort of thing. Often musicians would be there, too. The solo guy with a guitar. Or maybe a girl with a violin. Playing underneath that bridge. They would be muted everytime a train passed above. But most of the time the acoustics were great. And now? Well, no more trains.
As I walked I noticed something in the corner of my eye. For just a millisecond, but I stopped. It was one of the posters and it was hand written with a felt marker:
DRUMMER WANTED
And the rest was information about the genre (Metal) and where to find the band. It was difficult to read, because of the blackout.
I took out my mobile phone, it had 1% of charge left. When would I charge it again?
Didn’t matter, I switched on the flashlight and read the name and the address of the bar where one can inquire about the band. Luckily it wasn’t just a phone number, I thought. No more phone calls until winter.
The phone went dark.
I plotted a new way home and started walking in the direction of that bar.
Wondering what Metal music without electric guitars sounded like.
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The First Draft
Here’s some consolation:
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
– Ernest Hemingway
I’m just saying this because there is a high probabilty of shitty writing coming soon on this blog, because I want to write about ideas indirectly in the form of prose. My idea is this: I will come up with a subject and give one character some strong view on it, and another character an opposite strong view and well.. let’s see how that goes. Let’s hope something not too horrible writes itself. And if it’s bad.. well there’s always endless editing.
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The Gap
In a story worth telling a gap exists between intention and reality.
Just like electricity only flows if there is a voltage, humans (and animals) only act if they feel a desire. The desire is the fuel that triggers an intent and the intent leads to action. And every conscious action has an expected outcome. The gap comes in to make things interesting. It’s when the expected outcome is denied.
For example let’s imagine a story. Our protagonist has a desire. He wants to smoke a cigarette. He gets up from his desk and walks outside, because he never smokes inside. It’s a beautiful day. His craving for nicotine is being complemented by the joy of being outside. There is a package of cigarettes on the window ledge. He takes one and checks his pocket for a lighter. He takes it out. The lighter however doesn’t work. It’s out of gas.
This is the gap. It’s a mismatch between what he expected (he can light his cigarette) and what actually is true (he can’t).
The gap propels the story forward, because the desire is still there. (Unless our protagonist decides it’s a good moment to finally quit smoking. But even then the quitting intention could spin off a whole new story.)
So he forms a new plan of action. He starts searching the cupboards in the kitchen for another lighter. It takes a while. He gets more and more annoyed. His craving increases. Damnit, why is there no lighter? And while searching through a drawer he discoveres a strange letter. It’s addressed to his wife and the address is hand written. And beautifully so. With a man’s name in the sender address. Who could it be? Our protagonist is a jealous type. He feels a rush of envy..
Another gap opens. He was searching for one thing but found another. Should he open this letter? The gap is now between him wanting to know who the mysterious sender is and the rule of respecting another person’s, his wife’s in this case, privacy.
And so forth, the possibilities are ENDLESS. That’s why writing is highly addictive, I believe..
Gaps allow us to create an interesting story that unfolds in unexpected ways.
The opposite would be no gaps. He needs a working lighter and has one. The whole story would be about a man smoking a cigarette outside.
When writing, we can break the pattern of successful action.
Then magic happens.
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Tired of Competition
I am tired of competition. It seems to exist everywhere. Rap music is a good example, but it’s of course always a major feature in business. Countries compete against each other. The USA against China against Europe. We compete for jobs. We compete to get doctor appointments. Seats in restaurants and concert tickets. We keep score. Who has the most stuff? And even: Who checks most of the boxes in life?
Are you married? Check one. Do you have a kid? Check two. Two or more kids kids? Check three. Where did you go on your last vacation? .. and so forth.
I get it, it’s a fact of life of living on planet Earth. Access to resources has always been scarce and therefore there was always competition. Our current social order merely reflects that.
I also don’t believe it can be fixed by something like a revolution from above. Socialism has been tried, is still being tried even, and it is really bad. I think competition is here to stay in some fashion but perhaps our shared myth will be a different one. Perhaps it really won’t matter that much to show off material success. Or it won’t matter that much to check off invisible checkboxes. Perhaps other things will move to the foreground. Self actualization maybe. Or saving the planet. Or, who knows, maybe even colonizing Mars.
(And let’s not forget: Our capitalist system has many advantages. Let’s not forget: It is a major component why most of the world no longer lives in horrible poverty, without access to water, food, medicine and education. It also promotes peace.)
Finally, here’s the kicker. Most of my tiredness with competition might have to do with me being very competitive.
I mean this: The world as a whole is pretty meaningless. It’s just a large number of events constantly happening. And then we humans come along to give it meaning. But what meaning can we give unless we first recognize certain patterns? And what patterns can we recognize that are not within us?
Someone wrote: If you think the world is full of assholes, check yourself, because there’s a good chance you maybe be one.
I believe this is very true. So if I see competition everywhere and if I am tired of it, it’s probably just be me. I am competitive. My greed, my envy, my ambition filter the events of the world and present this picture to me.
By assuming this, I am free to work on myself. I can find a new truth, regardless of whether the external world, for example political system, changes. Because I also have my personal myth. I don’t have to accept other people’s versions of success. And, thankfully, we live in a relatively free society with lots of wiggle room to express our own views freely.
Another positive thing about our built in filters is this: Each one of us is a little bit different. Therefore the explanations we give and the stories we tell, differ. Maybe another blogger writes about the same subject, however his text will probably reflect on the matter in a slightly different way.
And that’s interesting. That’s worth having.
How are your filters? Do you care to tell us your story?
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