european zen garden

thoughts about truth and choices

There are some phrases I came across recently, which keep running through my mind:

"Truth is a daughter of time."
I found this one in an article about corruption in Austria, especially linked to the famous politician Jörg Haider, whom many used to venerate in a saint-like fashion. Now, years after his suicide, people slowly start to look at irregularities they used to brush over, and demystification and criticism slowly start to shape a more realistic image of what has happened. The quoted sentence stresses the fact that often, after the end of an aera, it takes a lot (maybe a generation even) of time for people to let go of sentimental and glorifying pictures, and to face reality.
Why do I think this phrase is remarkable? I find it fascinating, cause it brings a fact to the point about relationships on many levels (personal, couple, family, society): that it takes time, patience and courage, to find truth under the delusions one has build up about something or someone.

"Sometimes it is harder to be kind than clever."
This phrase is from a TED-Talk by Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon, given at a Princeton graduation ceremony. He uses it as basis to elaborate his statement that decisions in life matter more than the talents one has been given: Cleverness is something one has or not, it is given, so one cannot take credit for it. Kindness, on the other hand, is a decision put into practice, so it tells about the character of a person and shapes their personality.
The reason this statement keeps stunning me? It is the fact that often I am surrounded by very smart people, and could observe that some of them won't miss a chance to stress their superiority over others on the grounds of general cleverness. As far as I'm aware, they do so not neccessarily because they are arrogant snobs, but because they are so used to competing on that level (in the end, school teaches us so..) that they might not even notice how inappropriate this is on certain occasions (especially, if this superiority is already clearly established). I have the feeling that quite some marvellous, admirable, genius people could benefit a lot from accepting the challenge of practising kindness in their conduct.

"virtue is also if no-one is tempting you"

it is nice to have principles - as long as nothing challenges you to stick to them. i guess in many cases one then realises having missed out on half of the context of the situation (and every so-often also having judged people without having any idea about what they were going through).

so my question is: should one revise one's principles when realising that they were too narrowminded (ever heard of complicated principles??) or should one still stick to them (because it's a principle to stick to one's principles)?

complicated

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated."
- Poul Anderson

-- reminds me of an old hypothesis of mine: only few people can allow themselves declaring problems as 'easy': the ones that have no clue about it at all and therefore can not estimate the difficulties involved, or the experts who know everything related to it.
i feel that for everyone else somewhere on the path from one of these states to the other anderson's quote applies very well. --

sometimes

occasionally i wanted to write something of my pondering about love.. but then, everyone is speaking about it and still no-one can pin it down anyway.. and also, i'm normally rather fed up by the usual articles and headlines on the subject.

but then, on some days, i get this feeling of my heart opening so much as to enclose the whole world, and i can not do otherwise than smiling at it and all the people i meet. And they smile back. Which makes me realise that i love them all, somehow :)

no space pictures

i realised that i find taking pictures most interesting when being in transit - somewhere on my way between some 2 well defined locations. maybe it's because i know that what my camera catches is something which does not really exist like that in the 'normal' world and which is unlikely to be observed again in exactly the same way - a transition between different states of existence

3rd December

I seriously started studying for a terrible exam.. to get at least something done I dumped the pc under the table and sat just me and my script.. for several hours. Actually I was surprised that some things seemed not so difficult anymore, after overcoming my general aversion to the subject..

Studying was interesting, especially as I never would have thought that attempting to study logic might turn out so effective for instant meditation about all the worlds issues. In fact, there were so many interesting thoughts flowing through my mind, but at the same time it felt like a dream so I could not really catch them and make them stay..

Now I have a hard time remembering them; but I wonder if they are still somewhere in my mind, ready to come up at the right moment?

unexpected answer

some time ago I was wondering about what actually characterizes men (or women respectively). thanks to my special oracle (aka skype status messages) I found a surprising hint:

Real men write PostScript!

Just that it makes me wonder about real women....

Why life's like a puzzle

• if two pieces do not fit, they were not meant to be united.
• if two pieces nearly fit, they still do not really.
  
• if you force two pieces together you will only distort the picture and they will be missing somewhere else.
• each piece has it's own place, but the search for it can be long and difficult. at least it is bound to lead to success if one doesn't give up too early.
  
• everybody feels the emptyness of a missing piece. when it is finally found things fall into place and are cleared up.
• filling in gaps holds some surprises and might change your point of view.
• sometimes you can fit together a lot of pieces because you simply see the connections.
• sometimes you can not find any sense in all the chaos.
• either way, you keep going until you are finished.
  

turned inside out

sometimes I wonder if it is any use for a person's development to always search for the special, unknown, or pretend to be more clever so people would appreciate one.
actually i guess at this point the focus is exactly the wrong way round, as a person then is so fixated on the opinion of others that it is easy to forget how their inside actually looks like. it is as if they became strangers to themselves, which is likely to be the source of a lot of trouble. because how should they be authentic and rest in themselves, when they have forgotten how they are? this is probably quite difficult, but what is more is the scare they are likely to develop against looking at themselves as they really are. supposedly, one would notice one's faults first, as they probably were the first reason why one initially tried to make up with pretending. this might in fact be very hard to accept, but after delusion some positive surprises are likely to be in store, for example when a problem is mastered better than expected. in some sense it is like sounding one's limits, accepting the deficits as well as the talents.
actually, i do still not understand why often it seems to be so difficult to take on the good things about the own personality.. i wonder if it might have to do with responsibility? it seems as if accepting and promoting one's deficiencies would absolve the person in question of the responsibility of doing or at least attempting things in a specific area, so maybe for tricky things self-depreciation is the more comfortable option. conversely, does accepting a talent not imply the duty to train it (which might be hard work) as well as using it for something good (which might even be harder)?

Religion for dummies?

Further titles in that series also star Satanism for dummies, Jihad for dummies etc..
I wonder how good a book like that is, has anyone once opened one of them? I guess I am not so convinced of the attempt to squeeze religions or cults into a nutshell like that, claiming to make them easily accessible and less complex as they are. But maybe for a start? I don't know.

oh, there is even a link to pictures of scientology for dummies it seems they are about to publish it and want people's opinion on the cover. check it out :)

Flieh deinen Schatten nicht

Es war einmal ein Mann, den verstimmte der Anblick seines eigenen Schattens so sehr, der war so unglücklich über seine eigenen Schritte, daß er beschloß, sie hinter sich zu lassen. Er sage sich: Ich laufe ihnen einfach davon.

So stand er auf und lief davon. Aber jedesmal, wenn er seinen Fuß aufsetzte, hatte er wieder einen Schritt getan, und sein Schatten folgte ihm mühelos. Er sagte zu sich: Ich muß schneller laufen. Also lief er schneller und schneller, lief so lange, bis er tot zu Boden sank. Wäre er einfach in den Schatten eines Baumes getreten, so wäre er seinen eigenen Schatten losgeworden, und hätte er sich hingesetzt, so hätte es keine Schritte mehr gegeben. Aber darauf kam er nicht.

Tschuang-tse, in: Sinfonie für einen Seevogel und andere Texte des Tschuang-tse, hrsg. v. Thomas Merton, Patmos Verlag, Düsseldorf 1973, S. 130.

Gefunden auf http://www.zum.de/Faecher/kR/BW/bibellit/texte/t080.htm

Translation will follow soon.. couldn't find the English version so far.. click for other texts and information about the author

What makes a man a man? (C. Aznavour)

Recently I realized that holidays are coming through (just before they finish, but better late than never). Good indicators are usually that old 'fun' things revive, like cooking, knitting, building things, decorating.. in short, everything that does not involve computers or out of the house communication. So I feel a bit weird, noticing that these activities stunningly fit to the classical stereotype of a 'housewife' :)
This put me on the question as to which degree the old stereotypes about men and women are still alive/natural/valid? In the end I could not really say what makes someone 'classify' as 'man' or 'woman' (biology excluded). Any ideas?

And then?

Tomorrow CERN is planning to power up it's Large Hadron Collider, result of a project started in the 1980s. The objective of this experiment is not a trivial one - in fact, some physicists take it to provide key facts about the creation of the universe.
Now I wonder: what happens if it doesn't? For sure a lot of calculations were done so it is likely that some things can be observed. But in some sense I doubt that we will know the universe's deepest secrets in the near future. And I can't help imagining some irritated faces should the outcome of this experiment be: nothing?

networking

aka continuously connecting with people that are actually no longer there? I was thinking what would happen if suddenly internet would not exist anymore, and maybe also mobile phones.. and I realised that a huge part of my friends would really be offline and lost to me, as nowadays landline numbers or physical addresses are hardly exchanged anymore. I wonder how I would find them again.
on the other hand I wonder what makes people want to build these networks. one reason seems to me the unability to accept that when leaving a place for good you probably won't meet many of these people anymore - except for the few that really became good friends and/or have enough time and money to travel around. maybe it is too hard to face to say these final goodbyes. so we rather delve into the illusion of really being in touch with everyone.
I am not sure we really gain from this, because in some cases it is simply not honest. Also, I guess if one does not expect to see people again one often tends to be more sincere to them (which I generally think is lacking in everyday life) and in this way goodbye moments - if accepted as such - have even the potential to be the most precious in the sense of truth. and they allow to distance oneself from the people that are gone, to open the way to the ones that actually surround us.

But nothing compares to you

I personally think that unneccessarily comparing oneself to others is one of the main sources of people's unhappiness. However, I never manage to make up my mind in wondering if on some occasions it is a necessary tool for motivation to change oneself. It's probably about the reasons we have for comparing ourselves as well as the grounds on which we base our comparisons (i.e. if it is things we can change or not).

Regarding things we can not change I found some nice quotes (as usual I apologize for my rather crude translation, it's not so poetic but I still hope it catches the essence).

The first one is by Abbas Paphnutios

"An welchen Ort du auch hinkommst,
vergleiche dich nicht mit anderen
und du wirst Ruhe finden."

[Wherever place you go to,
do not compare yourself to others
and you will find peace]

The other one is by Charles de Montesquieu

"Wenn man nur glücklich sein wollte, wäre es ja bald getan:
aber man will ja glücklicher als die anderen sein,
und das ist fast immer schwierig,
weil wir die anderen für glücklicher halten,
als sie wirklich sind."

[If one only wanted to be happy, it would be an easy task:
but one always wants to be more happy than others,
and this is quite difficult
as we tend to take the others for happier
than they really are.]

Both I think point out a spectrum of thought which I find thrilling and worth to be tried in real life. Happy experimenting!

Soundless

Yesterday's ride on the underground left me very impressed and fascinated. Listening to my music, being completely cut out of my environment I witnessed a strange situation.
A quite fragile looking woman entered the coach, carrying a little suitcase, some child-painted cloth bag, and some sheets of paper. She sat down on the bench diagonal to me and started observing the people around. No sooner had we left the station that she bent over to the girl next to me, handing them the papers and pointing on it in a very urgent manner, but the girl didn't want to know anything about it.
At first I was startled as I wondered if she was actually begging; it's not usual here and also her simple cloths did not look ragged. Then she stretched out to me, so I felt I ought to have a look. So I took out my earplugs to ask her what it was all about. The answer surprised me: it was some ununderstandable sound, paired with the same clear body expressions she had showed with the other girl. The woman was deaf-mute. But she was not begging. Contrarily, she was campaigning for subtitles in television programmes! In fact, her sheets displayed statistics on subtitle coverage in various countries, with the US leading way ahead and European countries being all pretty bad.
I felt so much respect for this women: she seemed rather shy in her way of behaving, not at all intrusive, but at the same time she was fighting for being part of society. So she choose to overcome her hesitation and actually do something about the situation by bringing the problem to those people's minds who usually are not even aware about its existence.
In the end, she was more or less successful - all the people that actually gave her a chance to show her case signed her petition.

Repeating stupidity

It is amazing how often one repeats the same mistake despite the high probability that the outcome won't be more sucessful than the last. But on the other hand sometimes - some very few times - it actually is and I guess this is what makes people try again..

Incompatibility of humour

I pondered about this possibility for a long time, and just yesterday another thing proved my hypothesis about how different people percieve what for others is just a harmless way of joking. Tricky, tricky...

Why ask?

I wonder why people teach so much to ask questions, if they then do not respond. So why put yourself out and ask? And then maybe even run after people to force an answer out of them? Somehow I don't feel it's the way to do it..
But then, the ones who never ask, are they not bound to live in their little universe away from the ones around them?