|
 |
Sunday, January 1, 2006 |
...says Darrin M. McMahon (author of the forthcoming Happiness: A History) quoting John Stuart Mill:
'Those only are happy,' he came to believe, 'who have their minds fixed
on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of
others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit,
followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at
something else, they find happiness by the way.'
11:54:33 PM 
|
|
Dave Pollard offers a long reflection on what we've learned from the year-ago tsunami, the more recent hurricanes, and other dismaying events of modern life.
Things
are the way they are for a reason. We aren't prepared because we don't
want to know what might happen, and because we aren't prepared to bear
the cost of being prepared. It is in our nature not
to be prepared, to take things as they come, to live for the moment.
And while the cost of not knowing is astronomical, as the tsunami and
Katrina and all the other catastrophes that we deal with, badly, every
day, shows us, the cost of knowing
-- what we are doing to this world, and the consequences of those
actions, from the abuse that is happening behind every closed door on
the planet to the great extinction that we are precipitating -- is even
higher. We don't want to know. We don't want to hear about it. That is knowledge we cannot handle. This is worth chewing on, slowly. If it is in fact 'in our nature not
to be prepared,' and yet we must be prepared, how to we find the way to overcome our nature?
10:54:16 PM
|
|
© Copyright 2006 Gil Friend.
|
|
|
