Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection is from A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy and translated by Peter Sekirin.
”The exposure of a lie is as valuable to a community as a clearly expressed truth.”
Category: Quotes
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection is from David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, as he makes an important point about how climate change was a catalyst of populist movements over the past decade.
“Beginning in 2011, about one million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought—and in a very real sense, much of the “populist moment” the entire West is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants.”
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection is from The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman:
You can always get up after you fall, but remember, what has been said can never be unsaid. Especially cruel and hurtful things.
This is one of the reasons I’ve tried to focus on giving people the benefit of the doubt after being on the receiving end of cruel comments about a lie told about me. I’ve found assuming everyone is trying their best—even if I know they are not—helps to keep many situations from spiraling out of control.
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection is from Leo Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom as translated by Peter Sekirin. Spreading the wealth is healthier for society.
“Wealth reminds me of manure in the field. When it is in a big pile it makes a bad smell. But when it is distributed everywhere across the field, it makes the soil fertile.”
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection is from When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron.
Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, “Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?” Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, “Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection is a reflection on the power of anger when properly used from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.
Molly Knight is hosting a book club for subscribers to her The Long Game Substack about the book. I may have subscribed for her baseball writing, but I am really enjoying this extra perk. Molly is likely to do this again in the future, so that’s another great reason to subscribe and support her work.
“Anger is meant to be listened to. Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand. Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go. It lets us see where we’ve been and lets us know when we haven’t liked it. Anger points the way, not just the finger. In the recovery of a blocked artist, anger is a sign of health.”
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Timothy Snyder wrote in his essential book On Tyranny about how authoritarians need professionals to cooperate in carrying out their evil. We must remember that we all have a choice.
If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
American writer George Saunders spoke at Syracuse University’s graduation in 2013. I just saw an excerpt of his speech in the Small Bow newsletter written by A.J. Daulerio. I’ve been working on trying to meet this goal in other ways recently. But I was struck with all well Saunders said it.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.
It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.
Mary Oliver shared this observation in her poem, In Blackwater Woods, which is included in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, American Primitive:
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold itagainst your bones knowing
From In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Today’s Thought from my Readwise collection is from Amanda Knox’s Atlantic essay about how people continue to exploit for profit her identity and the lies told about her.
As someone who has been falsely accused, reading this impacted me in a significant way.
So now I also try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. We don’t know the whole story about any other person.
I know how it feels for a group of people to be wrong about me. That is a pain I don’t wish on others. So I work to refrain from the judgment of others. I don’t want to make that same mistake.
All of this has made me extremely skeptical of those who easily pass judgment. It has made me allergic to the impulse to flatten others into cardboard, to erase their human complexity, to rage against things about which I know only a snippet. Judgment only gets in the way of understanding. Refraining from judgment has become a way of life for me. Call it radical empathy, or extreme benefit of the doubt. I know how wrong people were about me, and I don’t ever want to be that wrong about another person. The world is not filled with monsters and heroes; it’s filled with people, and people are extraordinarily complex.
“My Identity Continues to Be Exploited,” by Amanda Knox in The Atlantic