210427 What I learned in my studies this morning

New technology... 

Nature is pushed aside. 

Find balance, find peace. 

From The Daily Stoic: 

Take a 50,000 foot view — seeing connections and the big picture. 

Take a veteran's* view — seeing with a practiced eye and finding that this situation is not unique, repeated uncounted time by innumerable people throughout history. 

Take a neophyte's view — finding the naive beauty and mystery of the piece and appreciating its novelty. 

Take the skeptic's view — doubting what I see and looking for unspoken assumptions and hidden agendas. 

Changing how I see things gives me insight into what's really in front of me. I must practice shifting my mind from view to view so I better understand how best to proceed. 

 

Today's Meditation:

Sonder — Realizing that other people have a life, including an inner life, as complex as one's own. They are not NPCs to themselves.  They are not villains (or saints) in their own mind. 

Reflecting on Tolstoy's final point, my wife and I made an agreement early on in our relationship: if one of us did something to upset the other, and there were two ways to view what happened — one which assigned malign purpose to the other and one which assumed it was accidental or unintended — we would always give the other person the benefit of the doubt unless and until it was proven they did it deliberately. 

In more than 20 years of marriage, we have yet to find a time when it wasn't a misunderstanding. 

Not once.

============

* Veteran as one who has long practice in the type of thing considered, not in the military sense.