Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
I asked Cheryl what she thought was the most effective way to dispel people’s misplaced fears and animosity towards wolves, and replace it with awe and respect for life. She emphasized the importance of telling stories about individual lives like Takaya’s. Our tendency as humans is to glaze over when we are overwhelmed by numbers and statistics; but when we learn about the injustices faced by an individual, or the challenges they’ve overcome, we naturally build an emotional connection. Empathy takes root. That’s where real change can happen.
Kafka urges the young man to stay present with his difficult emotions:
Just be quiet and patient. Let evil and unpleasantness pass quietly over you. Do not try to avoid them. On the contrary, observe them carefully. Let active understanding take the place of reflex irritation, and you will grow out of your trouble. Men can achieve greatness only by surmounting their own littleness.
Nathan Schneider—whose Governable Spaces I am always recommending—said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since:
I think of tech as a wildfire—it burns really quickly. And we get a lot of wildfires out here, and there's the front of it, where the blaze is, and then once it's burnt over, that's when cool things start growing up. They grow much slower, and they find their way through…the burned trees and new life happens. I kind of hope we're entering that phase of social media that we're done with the fast burn. And maybe it had to happen.
What’s there after the fire passes over if not that goddamn mushroom at the end of a world?
On the extortion of sensitivity:
We also live in a culture that has warped sensitivity from the measure of our porousness to life — the openhearted porousness from which all creative work springs — into a means of manipulation, extorting sympathy and slack, unconcerned with creation.
The only way I knew how to process being sick was to think about it in terms of a finished art project.
“These are the times in life—when nothing happens—but in quietness the soul expands.”
—Wilderness, Rockwell Kent