Erlank Pienaar
@erlank
•leave•no•path•untaken•
Erlank Pienaar
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The examined life
What if our worst qualities are actually our best? Recently I listened to an interview with Irish theologist and poet John O’Donohue from 2006 in which he asked what would happen if the things we hate about ourselves, the qualities we despise and can’t stand, are actually the best things about who we are. It was a powerful reframe... See more
What if our worst qualities are actually our best? Recently I listened to an interview with Irish theologist and poet John O’Donohue from 2006 in which he asked what would happen if the things we hate about ourselves, the qualities we despise and can’t stand, are actually the best things about who we are. It was a powerful reframe... See more
Good Billionaires and the Last of Silicon Valley’s Original Founders
When up is down…
Meanwhile, some of the most serious people I know do their serious thing gratis and make their loot somewhere else. My dad, whose photographs sit at the top of every Experimental History post, quit his job at the newspaper and went to work as a postal carrier instead. Why? As he puts it: “I could afford better lenses delivering mail than I could... See more
Adam Mastroianni • Surely You Can Be Serious
A man of letters… post / mail / words working hard for UBI - serving the commons, in order to facilitate personal expression. Work to live, not live to work.
On the importance of tacit knowledge and why reality has a surprising amount of detail. Without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don't have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them.
The things you say often don't stick, and the few things that do stick are often
... See moreWriter and scholar C.S. Lewis on what why small choices matter:
“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never... See more
“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never... See more
James Clear • 3-2-1: Two ways to grow, how to criticize, and a simple recipe for finding good opportunities
These astonishing adaptations are the sum total of myriad small defiances of prediction — chances taken on the improbable and the untested, wild guesses at the shape of the possible — without which bats would not exist. But they do, and we need them. We need bats — “swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together,” D.H. Lawrence... See more
Why Bats Shouldn’t Exist: The Limits of Knowledge, the Pitfalls of Prediction, and the Triumph of the Possible Over the Probable
The intelligence of life and the adaptability of nature. We live in the sacred expression of God’s exploration, life as the only absolute. Love it.
"[This is] the key to the mystery is the old adage "a word to the wise is sufficient." Because this phrase is not only overused, but overused in an indirect way (by prepending the subject to some advice), most people who've heard it don't know what it means. What it means is that if someone is wise, all you have to do is say one word to them, and
... See moreSometimes it’s nice to remember all the other people one has been. Especially when settling into hard-core middle-age. I love being this me, but I loved being that me, too.