Enjoying the view from Limbo
Anyone who has ever slipped backwards on ice or fallen down a flight of stairs knows the feeling: the trajectory of uncontrolled descent having passed the point of no return, you have no choice but to wait for the painfully certain outcome, helplessly. In addition to the two generic examples I have just mentioned, I also have a particularly personal memory — possibly...
You cannot do what you have never attempted. You cannot attempt what you have never imagined. You cannot imagine what you have never seen. You cannot see what your faculties have never sought out. You cannot seek out what you have never desired. You cannot desire what you have never thought of. You cannot think of what you have never experienced. You cannot...
To overcome something, you must face it, live with it, struggle through it, understand it deeply, and work out a way to surmount its debilitating or harmfully limiting effects. Merely avoiding the thing from the outset, by contrast, is not an alternative means of overcoming it, but rather a method of ensuring that you will never overcome it. Failure, spiritual pain, loneliness, the...
The number of people who will disappoint you in your life will vastly outstrip the number who will pleasantly surprise you. Worse yet, many of the former group will come from among the latter, which is particularly painful, as dashed hopes will sting most where hopes were highest. Nevertheless, this does not justify ceasing to seek the rare pleasant surprises. For even the...
I have failed at many things in my life — by which I mean I have suffered many outcomes which in their times, provisionally, within the horizons visible to me at those moments, appeared as failures to me, and probably would have appeared so to any sympathetic outside observer as well. I have learned through experience that what we term our “failures,” within...
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 19, 2019 · Last modified October 28, 2019
If awareness is our essence, then human life, as experienced, is everything you did not miss. Of course, our mind’s gaze, like our eye’s, will necessarily miss most things — almost all things, proportionally. It follows that the fullest life possible to us is not the one which chases the greatest quantity of sights — a fool’s errand, given the natural limits of...
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