Chaos Node

Not all love stories have happy endings, and not all frogs are princes. Well, perhaps deep inside, but it would require divine intervention in some cases!

It has gradually become clearer to me that my JulNoWriMo novel is in fact like a single play-through of a ren-ai game (dating sim or visual novel of romantic nature).

When playing such a game, you get to know a number of imaginary people of the preferred gender, and based on your choices, their relationship with you will rise or fall. At some point you will need to show preference for one of them over the other – and it needs to be realistic in terms of your personal statistics –  in order to get a “good ending”.  Depending on the maturity of the game, the depiction of a good outcome may vary, but that is somewhat beyond today’s lesson.

What I want to achieve is to write a novel that may or may not lead to a “good ending”, but that at least conveys the personalities of the girls so well that the reader in his or her imagination is able to go down the other paths to reach a “good ending” for their favorite girl without compromising her personality. It is a safe bet that I won’t get anywhere near a completion in July. Probably not ever, if I know myself, which I increasingly do.  But there is always a small chance.

One of the most unlikely inspirations for my writing is the book The Laws of Courage by Ryuho Okawa, the would be world savior from Japan. (Or Atlantis, or Venus, depending on your time horizon.) Despite the occasional (well meant?) blasphemy, he is a really interesting person. And he truly writes like a god – more exactly Hermes, the god of speed. A couple years older than me, he has already written over 500 books!  Only about 15 of these are available in English from Amazon.com though. This is the latest of them, though a new one is supposed to be released later this year.

The Laws of Courage is written mostly for the young reader, although there is also a chapter about how to keep the good part of being young – a “hungry” spirit – later in life. Even simpler than some of his other books, it speaks directly to the concerns of young people in the midst of making choices for their lives. As such, it gives me some good idea for my own writing.

His ultimate advice for living life like a roaring fire of courage, is to imagine your death.  What do you want to have achieved when you die? How do you want to be remembered? What kind of person do you want to be when you lay down the workbook of your life? In its naked essence, courage means to be ready to die.

(Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of courage.  Although a couple weeks ago I was lying on my bed, thinking about how the floor of this old house might collapse under the weight of my double bed, and suddenly I realized that unexpectedly I was not afraid of death. I am sure this is not permanent. When I get severely ill, I will probably feel fear again. To some degree I think this is biological. What I no longer felt was the deep conviction that upon leaving this world, I would surely go to Hell.  Maybe I will and have only been deluded by the writings of the Antichrist.  But then again, something has begun to change deep inside me.  I am more consciously thinking of how I can actually be a blessing, rather than how I can rig things so I won’t be punished.)

Perhaps the nature of love, even divine love, is  to go down the path to the Good Ending for the other person. Which, with pleasant irony, is the one that does not end.

Filed under:
games, religion, writing by itlandm

A little known fact? People who play dating sims descend from molluscs.

As my July novel slowly, slowly unfolds, more and more of the girls become likable.  I am not very surprised, since girls tend to be likable in real life as well. My research (watching anime, reading manga and trolling forums) has shown me that the ideal format for my story would probably not be a novel or a screenplay or a movie, but a computer game.  More exactly a “dating sim”.  Now, I am used to playing The Sims, and both Sims1 and Sims2 had dating expansions: Hot Date for Sim1, and NightLife for Sims 2. There is no such thing for Sims3, which is a shame, since I find dating in that game hard to do. My sims usually end up adopting some random kid when they approach the latter part of their adult life. -_-

Anyway, it turns out that dating sims are not actually about The Sims, but is a genre that is very popular in Japan but very unpopular in the west.  In such a game, you play a boy or (in fewer games) a girl, living through a specific time of their life where they have the opportunity to meet a number of different people.  The goal is to form a romantic relationship with a person of the opposite sex (or, in extreme rare games, of the same sex).  The games differ in that some of them offer an ending depicting sexual intercourse, while others do not. There are often released two different version of the same game, where the non-explicit version has more of the milder content.

I think this is a great idea.  It saves people from experimenting on each other. On the down side, the reproductive rate in Japan is really low. The country will be almost empty in a few generations unless something changes. Hopefully the production of robot catgirls will eventually be high enough to replace the falling population.  (That was a joke.)

Anyway, I’ve tried out one of the few dating sims in English. Well, supposedly there are more of them, but this is an innocent one and you don’t play it online so they are not gathering information about you. It is vaguely recommended for people who are curious about the genre.  The game is called “Summer Session”. It can be run on Windows, Mac or Linux. The graphics look dated, as it were, but that probably means it runs on pretty much any old machine that you can get it installed on.

I’ve played through it a couple times. It is kind of neat that you can learn from your mistakes so you make new mistakes next time.  ^_^  Unfortunately in real life you can’t go back and do it over like that, so that’s why we need to listen to the guidance of Heaven. Incidentally, Heaven says to not get too absorbed in such games, but then that’s just common sense.

I am pretty confident that my writing is better anyway.  Although it won’t have multiple endings. Probably.

Filed under:
games, writing by itlandm

From the anime KimiKiss Pure Rouge (I keep spelling it Rogue, but actually it is probably because it has an insane amount of blushing). Anyway, the meaning will make sense further down.

Things have their ebb and flow, and right now my creative writing has its ebb. It may look like it is not just the creative, but I have actually been writing some pretty groundbreaking non-fiction too. Unfortunately it is not ready to be shared, I think.  I guess this goes into the “bottom of the iceberg” for now.

Also for the benefit of my writing, I have watched Japanese high school love anime.  First I reviewed my favorite episodes of the series Hatsukoi (meaning First love).  Well, that one is partly about middle schoolers too.  As such, it is fairly decent, although it did have more vaguely erotic moments than I remembered.

Then I started watching KimiKiss Pure Rouge, another similar series which (like Hatsukoi) was not very well received by fans.  Traditionally school love anime has either been about one couple and their rivals, or one boy and a circle of different girls.  The first type is usually aimed at girls, the second at boys.  Oh, the surprise!  I am actually writing a story about a boy and his relationship (or lack thereof) with a number of girls, mostly in the Literature club at his school.  Unsurprisingly, the working title is Closed Books.

Both Hatsukoi and KimiKiss Pure Rouge, however, have a number of different pairings and especially love triangles.  KimiKiss has, from what I can see so far, three different male protagonists each with two different love interests.  They are generally not very honest with themselves either.  I guess that is business as usual, but when the three main character are blandly deceiving themselves despite intrusive memories of their real feelings, it becomes a little like parody, I think. I am a bit past halfway and I find it kind of hard to watch now.

Anyway, I think I just realized something pretty important when writing about love.  See, the problem is not really that I don’t know much about sex. This is a story about high schoolers, and if they are lucky, they don’t know much about sex either. The difference is that I don’t know much about loneliness. Barely anything at all.  A few minutes a few times in a lifetime. Perhaps an hour in total?

Ah, this may be hard.  Just when I think I have this “being human” thing down, I suddenly come upon something like this. Not that I am complaining, mind you. The thought of being alone, without the Presence, is like Hell itself.

Perhaps I should write about being a sixth-dimensional programmer instead, but who in their right mind would read that? People don’t even believe in the fifth dimension, even though it only takes a few minutes ridiculously simple practice each day for a while to begin sensing it.

Filed under:
meta, writing by itlandm

And probably the last.  The lung lady was quite upset that I had not taken the medication. I explained why: There had been no measurable effect of the drug they tested last time, and it seemed likely that my lungs simply were only 80% effective because I had spent my whole life breathing only 80%. After my childhood asthma, I had automatically checked myself every day and night of my life, slowing down before getting seriously winded. So there was no reason for my lungs to develop fully.

She still thinks I have asthma, which is probably true in a certain sense – you may call it potential asthma – but I still think there must be better ways to go about this than giving pharmacy companies a drinking straw in the health insurance for the remainder of my lifetime.

The throat specialist agreed that it was quite likely that part of the reduction was irreversible, and what they had wanted was to find out just how much. If I ever want to try that, I can call them after about a month of using the drugs, he said.

From what I have dredged up, the long-term inhaler is a local-effect anti-inflammatory drug. It basically dampens the immune system in the lungs. That seems like a pretty bad idea unless my body gets upset over nothing and attacks itself. Of course, a lot of people experience just that.  But meditation and self-reflection is known to prevent it, as the main source in most people is chronic stress.  I intend to continue down that road and see what happens.

Filed under:
my health, slice of life by itlandm

This morning I had long and complex dreams, since my alarm did not go off as it does on workdays.  Most is forgotten, of course, but toward the end I was in a city that looked too perfect, too sparkling clean and modern. It made me think of the capital city of the Praetorian alternate world in City of Heroes. Anyway, I went into a large church there.  They were about to cure some people of deadly diseases.  The first was a young woman who went into an enclosure beyond our sight.  I had a bad foreboding about this.  At the same time, a woman was wandering around in the church, telling about how she could not afford surgery.  I and the woman beside me were about to give her money (something I would not do in real life, since in real life people lie shamelessly if they can get paid for it). A very muscular man came over and stopped us.  ”All money should be given to the Church, which will then use it to help those in need.”  There was a definite “or else…” in his demeanor, and I got out of there very quickly.  After a stroll on the city’s moving pavements, I returned with a coworker to the garage under the cathedral, just as they were removing the bloody remnant of the girl who was “cured”.  Exploded seems a more fitting description of what happened to her.

The other dream I remember was of attending a job-related seminar, about some new software that was introduced.  I understood it easily, but most of the people there were just ordinary users, and they had a harder time with it. Two of them were from Kristiansand, where I work, and we knew each other at least somewhat. I cannot now remember if I know them in real life, but I know the type at least.  They were women, like most of those present, and rather cute. I wanted to look at one of them in a lustful way, but did not get around to it before the seminar was over and we all had to leave.  Evidently ogling women is not a high priority even in my dreams anymore.  Someone had forgotten a camera, though I don’t remember if it was me. There was also something else computer-related going on, but it did not make it to my long-term memory.   As if this is not enough filler.

In waking life, a badly incapacitated bumblebee was in the upstairs hallway, right outside my bedroom door.  Later today she was crawling along downstairs, outside my bathroom door.  It is  a big one, presumably a mother bumblebee (kind of like queen bees, but bumblebees have fewer offspring.) I have had a couple of those come inside to die before, but it is weeks since last time. I wonder what makes them come inside and, from the looks of it, seeking me out. Does their little bumblebee spirit regard me as some kind of god, thinking that if they can only die in my presence, they will be guaranteed a good afterlife?  Or are they simply instinctively trying to get stepped on, to end the pain?

Well, I don’t even really understand myself, so what is the chance that I will understand the dying wish of a bumblebee?

Filed under:
slice of life by itlandm

Books!

For now, JulNoWriMo (July Novel Writing Month) is just a dust cloud after NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month (which is actually international almost since the start).  But it is growing. And I fully expect that eventually there will be more of them, until every month is novel writing month, and reasonably good novels are available for free in larger quantity than you could read even if you were retired but not tired.

But that is still some way off, even barring spectacular global disasters. For now, we are just a bunch of overly optimistic (and pretentious) people, most students, and most of us will probably never actually complete our masterworks, much less rewrite them, edit them, polish them and publish them. Though it may well happen to someone.  And we certainly won’t do any of the above if we never try.

Although there are better things to try during July, I suppose.  I was sorely tempted to impulse buy a greatly shortened version of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, today, from my mobile phone.  The HTC Hero upgraded itself to Android 2.1 today, after having been stuck on 1.5 for the longest time. What does this have to do with the Summa Theologica? Well, the thing is  that there is a free Kindle program for Android phones, but it was only made for later versions, not 1.5, so today was the first day I could actually use it. Thus the temptation. I was only a few keypresses away. Because, you know, I don’t have enough Books of the Truth to last me for an eternity already…

Forgot the mobile phone at home today.  Been months since last time. (It was after I came home that it updated itself, because it waited for me to say OK. And to backup the whole thing, which I didn’t, and I don’t seem to have lost anything. Your loss may vary.) So anyway, there were 2 missed calls from the Mormon Missionaries, and I did not find them at the place we had agreed to meet.  I will probably drag the book along tomorrow too.

On a related note to almost all of the above, I finished my re-read of Okawa’s “Science of Happiness” on my way home. I was thinking of replacing it with my third-and-a-half read of “Philosophy of Progress” – the one with Higher Thinking for Infinite Prosperity. I mean, you all want Infinite Prosperity, right? But in the end I opted for “The Laws of the Sun”. It has a higher concentration of weird stuff than any other I have seen, with numerous sunken continents and all the higher dimensions. If there is any of his books that can cast some real doubt on his sanity, it should be the one. Unsurprisingly, it is a best-seller in Japan. 0_O

Perhaps Aquinas would not be such a bad idea after all.

But he would probably not inspire any romantic fiction for JulNoWriMo. I think that is pretty sure.

Filed under:
slice of life by itlandm

I’m sorry… I lied. Or at least cowardly failed to tell the truth, which would be something like “I know what you are, and I assure you in front of the Light that we would both spend our time more wisely talking to cauliflowers than each other.”

I need to take God more seriously when he “talks” to me. That is to say, when I know in my heart what God wants me to do. OK, it is sometimes hard to say what is God and what is just plain sanity. Like “don’t be polite to Mormons unless lives depend on it”.

The other day I met two of those excessively well-dressed cute boys, speaking reasonably good Norwegian, hailing me on my way to the bus. They wanted to talk to me about Jesus Christ.  I think the irony here can be cut with a diamond saw, but being the polite guy I am, I stopped and talked with them. Not wanting to get into a religious discussion, I praised Jesus Christ for his contribution to western civilization, which it is safe to say would not have been anywhere the same – or even been anywhere – without him. No offense to Hermes and friends, but history just made a pretty sharp turn down there in the Middle East back then.

Needless to say, the overly polite missionaries gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon (which is supposedly completed my Mr. Mormon’s son, Moroni, but which was for some reason not named accordingly.) Since I seem to have displaced my previous copy – probably during one of the moves – I eventually accepted the book, and in return gave them my phone number. The local branch of God did not approve.

The book is, for lack of a better word, even more “moronic” than I remember it from the first time I acquainted myself with it.  That is not to say that it is a bad document. It has much positive, which I believe is without exception lifted from the Bible, of which it is a rather obvious copy.  My impression is that the “Mormons” – the members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints – are good people, by and large. They also count the Bible as Holy Scripture. Not saying that this makes them good people – there are some truly awful people who worship the Bible as if it were a god.

The thing is, even if I had the power to dissuade these missionaries from their path – which I can’t, since I am not that awesome, and since changing their religion would cause them to lose face, not to mention their friends, their jobs, their families and their future marriages – even if I could change their minds, it seems unlikely that I could change them for the better.  That is not to say that there is no better faith than theirs. Mine is better for me, obviously, but it is also pretty personal and verging on unique.  What I mean is, most organized religions would not really be an improvement in terms of living a happy, peaceful, friendly life which most likely would serve as good practice for a great afterlife.

Even in this day and age, most people are not very personal.  That is to say, they don’t have a soul (psyche) that is very differentiated.  Much like sheep (which incidentally have a very good reputation in the Bible) these people tend to look to those around them and run in the same direction.  For such people to understand me and others like me is quite literally impossible.  This is not a matter of me being “better” than them, but rather more capacious. A child of 7 may be morally superior to a 70 year old, but there are many things the child cannot possibly understand. In the same way, there are things an unreflected person cannot understand, even after a long life, because that long life does not include that particular type of experiences that a reflected, individualized person has.

Needless to say, people who only have experience of the 5th dimension (Blue vMeme) and below will firmly believe that this is very nearly all there is. They may dimly perceive that there is something more which may be attainable in this life, but that is the realm of prophets and such.

As I said, this is really the situation for all religions.  I am sure the vast majority of Happy Science followers have the same sheepish attitude. Even among “Smith’s Friends” (not Joseph Smith, Johan Oscar Smith) there accumulated such people over the years, despite starting out with none of them and literally telling those who appeared to get out.  I guess it can’t be helped.  But I should have listened to God – or the voice of reason, since they agree heartily on this – and kept far away from this latest bunch.

Filed under:
religion, slice of life by itlandm

Indeed it is a dream rated 18 and above, that is why I don’t write about it in detail.

This morning again I woke up from a hellish dream. In my dream, I was a woman on another planet, sometime in the age of space travel.  I was a kind of ninja warrior type, and at the time I woke up I was torturing a father to death in front of his daughter whom he had abused.

The emotional intensity of the dream was not as high as the real thing would have been, but it was definitely not a good feeling.  Despite an hour of delta wave entrainment, my mind remained restless this morning.

The thing is, I used to read stories like this until fairly recently. They still sell them over at Fictionwise (now Barnes & Noble e-books) and probably many other places, and they are common enough.  I suppose there are reasons why we are drawn to read stories like that, apart from killing time. A twisted sense of justice comes to mind.  And of course the intensity of emotion.  Though I suppose people who have TV, and especially American TV channels, won’t get much emotional intensity out of a book after seeing literally thousands of people being killed before their eyes in a lifetime. (If you have children and TV in the same room, you are hardly in a position to judge those who sacrificed their children to Moloch.)

I would write stories about war and fighting and killing when I was younger. To be honest, I felt a need to write them, a kind of relief. Writing made from such a motivation has no right to be shared, and I didn’t.  Therapeutic writing I have seen it called, and I suppose it may work that way, if you practice self-reflection afterwards.  Otherwise you may well end up perpetuating the darkness inside.  I think the same thing about the dreams.  They tell me something about myself, but I am no longer a passive observer of myself. Observer yes, but the purpose of my observation is not to continue being the same until I die.  I am in a process of change.   “All that is revealed is Light.”

On that note, I am not happy to see the new expansion to City of Heroes, Going Rogue.  No, it is not inspired by a certain American politician.  Wouldn’t that be cool, perhaps we could have gotten new Defender power sets:  Faith Healing and Hunting Rifle.  But noo, we are offered a whole expansion based on moral ambiguity, betrayal and dark secrets. What the hell, people.  City of Heroes used to be a pretty straight forward game, where the strong defended the weak.  As a bystander would say from time to time: “Forget those postmodern deconstructionists, Itland is a true hero, plain and simple.”

I know real life is not quite as simple as your nearby Southern Baptist may claim, but then again neither are the Southern Baptists.  Lots of them have their own secrets.  But enough about that, the fact is that if you need to keep secrets more sinister than a surprise birthday party, it’s self-reflection time!

Now back to writing. There is a lot of writing in the world, and very little of it is great literature.  Most of it is simply entertainment, and I won’t judge that, especially since my attempts at fiction have mostly been like that.  When you write within certain genres, it is like a contract between you and the reader, that you will sell them cheap entertainment and that’s it.  You don’t go into McDonalds and expect high cuisine, much less a communion wafer and consecrated wine.  Conversely, you don’t expect junk food in a five-star restaurant, much less in a cathedral.  These distinctions also exist in literature, but they are sometimes less clear.

Great works of literature (and other arts) are made by great people, but sometimes also by crazy people. They break apart and the great work of art claws its way out. But most crazy people don’t have such great works within, just more crazy. So that is not a recommended path!  Greatness is always a good idea, regardless of whether you will then go on to create great writing.

Anyway, unless you are doing the equivalent of a literary hot dog stand, there is a certain responsibility in writing.  You can write what you want, but if you influence other people, you should expect to be somewhat accountable. Sure, they are free to do with what they read as they want.  Unless you have pretended to be some kind of spiritual guide, you cannot really take responsibility for everything that happens to people who read you. But it may be wise to reflect on the possibility that your words may outlive you, and affect people for a long time to come.  What would happen in that case?

Gearing up for JulNoWriMo, I am also asking myself this. Will my writing lead others into temptation?  Will someone wake up, many years from now, and feel dirty or unhappy because they relive in their dreams something I wrote? I hope not, but I must admit that my fiction tends to contain elements of a mildly carnal nature.  This is after all the human condition.  And humans can be very entertaining, even fictional ones.  But at least there will be no killing in this year’s book, and almost certainly no actual procreative acts. Although there will likely be many other creative acts, Light willing.

Filed under:
autobiography, slice of life, writing by itlandm

Food – the final frontier!

I definitely can eat more fat now without getting fat poisoning.  I am not sure quite how much. But when I don’t get sick, the inborn human tendency causes me to gradually eat more fat. Not every day, but now and then, a little bit more, taking a chance.  Over time, oh so slowly, it adds up.  I get used to eating a little more fat than before, and then a little more again.

I still eat a lot less fat than before.  I still eat less fat than healthy people.  But there is definitely more of it than before.  This past couple weeks I have several times eaten noodles with some added cheese.  I have done that before with low-fat cheese and not gotten sick, but this time I used normal cheese.  (I have returned to low-fat now, the shop was just out of it briefly.)  My weight loss has stopped, although it is too early to say if it is reversed yet.

I have no idea what happened.  Perhaps my liver has just regenerated – it has lots of stem cells after all, and it has been 5 years since the illness that brought this to a head.  Perhaps the brainwave entrainment plays a role – several of the symptoms were neurological after all. Perhaps even the changes in my soul affects my body.  Or perhaps it is just part of the natural changes of growing older.  It may even be, though I am loath to even think it, that a hidden tumor may be sweeping up fat from my bloodstream for its own nefarious ends.  You just never know everything, not being a god or anything.  But I can’t say I feel ill in any way, so that last part is pretty far down on my probability list.

In any case, fat is very tasty and I enjoy being able to eat a little more of it, even if just a bit. Those of you who can eat as much fat as you want should enjoy it.  And then work out like crazy, I suppose. From what I read in scientific magazines, pretty much all the problems with obesity come from the inactivity that is either the cause or the effect of the obesity, sometimes both. It is not actually enjoying fat that is a problem, it is Just Sitting There. Our bodies were not designed for that.  The muscles we use when standing and walking mop up huge amounts of dangerous fat from the blood, but if we don’t stand or walk some hours each day, the stuff will just pile up. Or that is the current theory.  There may well be another next year.

But for now, I enjoy it for all it is worth… while it is still reasonably healthy!

Filed under:
my health, slice of life by itlandm

I am not sure if I have used this picture before, but I am sure I have considered it dozens of times, because it fits with so much of what I write. And then in the meaning “I have to study more”.

When I was little, I loved to learn random things. I grew up in a home filled with books and papers and magazines, and have three older brothers, so I learned to read long before my first school day. I remember withdrawing to the attic with a book often. The place was just used to store things, it was not really finished, but for me it was a special place.  If I remember correctly, I called it “klokingshulen”, a Norwegian pun meaning either “the sage’s cave” or the “the cave of the process of becoming wise”. I cannot remember if I came up with this name or one of my brothers, we were all a creative little bunch. But I remember spending time there alone with textbooks and such.

Knowledge is not wisdom, but it is a good start.  Before you can cook a meal, you need to have ingredients.  And before you can think deeply, you need to have something to think about! I am glad I loved reading, and looking at things, and using my imagination.  When I had read something new, I would afterwards use my imagination and create stories where these things appeared.

In grade school we learned by heart the multiplication table, but soon I understood that multiplication was just repeated addition. It is still kind of awesome to live in a world where two times three gives the same result as three times two, but it is kind of logical if you can count.  I suppose all healthy kids understand this pretty quickly. In the same way, we find patterns in other things as well. This is what I call understanding.  It goes beyond rote learning and provides a sort of shortcut in thinking.  Without learning, we would not find those patterns in things and be able to go forth and multiply our knowledge, so to speak, taking it to a higher order.

Somewhere, sometime, someone must have pondered the relationship between addition and multiplication. And they must have realized that if you could just repeat addition and get multiplication, then you would get something if you repeated multiplication as well.  I don’t know who first thought of it, but already the ancient Egyptians realized that if 3 and 9 were holy numbers, then 27 must be too, and 81 must be really holy.  So someone there was at least dimly aware of the power of “powers”. Today, computers are based on the powers of 2 – binary – and our common way of writing numbers is based on the powers of 10.

Wisdom is kind of like that. You take understanding one step higher, and then you find some way to make it useful.  Well, that is one way of looking at it at least. Wisdom is not just being able to learn, and being able to generalize from what you learn, but it is finding what is really important in what you have learned and understood, and applying that to your life.  Or at least that is part of it.

Anyway, you can kind of learn wisdom from others, by reading books of wisdom etc.  But you cannot just jump to that. You have to have knowledge and understanding first.  You cannot cook without ingredients or build without materials.  Also, I am not sure, but I think you need some hands-on experience of wisdom in order to “get it” when you see it elsewhere.  Still, you can definitely learn wisdom from others. And you should, because life is short.

If you enjoyed learning facts and loved understanding things, if flashes of insight gave you a thrill, then recognizing words of wisdom is likely to fill you with a bliss so overwhelming that it is hard to describe. Sometimes I can hardly contain my joy when finding another piece of the puzzle, opening up another part of the larger picture.

And it is good that I feel this joy, because the book may taste like honey when I eat it, but it burns in my stomach. Digesting wisdom – getting it embodied in my own flesh, so to speak – is the tough part. It usually comes at the expense of something else. I guess sometimes you have to bring out the butcher’s knife. But sometimes all I do is hold on, and the stupidity dies eventually.  Looking at some of the fantasy books I carried this February on the icy, slippery path in the freezing wind, I remember looking at them afterwards and still thinking I would read them again Someday.  But after months of reading a little wisdom most days of the week, the idea of going through those fantasy books again is like drinking from a puddle.  I would have to be pretty desperate.

There is a saying – I think I picked it up in the Christian Church – that “wisdom is none other than seeing the folly”.  Certainly that is a big part of it.  And first and foremost in our own lives.  But then perhaps eventually we can help others solve their problems too. There certainly are enough problems in the world, and it seems to me that the vast majority of them come from thinking that is counter-productive.  That is to say, people think thoughts that make it harder for them to live good, happy, satisfying lives.  If only there was some way to reach them!

Filed under:
autobiography, philosophy by itlandm