Joseph

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant... See more

Those of us who have learned now know that the dance doesn't start at a particular time. It is geared to no schedule. It starts when "things" are ready!

It’s going to be an expert through the proving of data — an expert through action, rather than an expert through appointment.

Fiction’s abyss is si-lence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is To-tal Noise, the seething static of every particu-lar thing and experience, and one’s total free-dom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.

It is the story that makes the difference.

So, it’s very easy not to know north from south because it all looks the same, the ice and the overcast sky. And he said, “Well, you know, it’s just now,” he might have been in his fifties, “it’s just now that I think I begin to understand the ice.” And he’d been living there all his life. Then he said, “And now I’m really too old to hunt.”

But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.