Perhaps consider;
Did you ever do the thing that’s angering you, right now?
If not – ask what use your anger is to you, right now.
It may be useful, or it may not.
“Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.” – Aristotle
Photo by Furfante
One day you awoke from a sleep
That you did not know you’d been in.
Since then
You awoke every morning
And
You slept every evening
And you went on
Like this was perfectly normal.
You probably did not stop to consider
How long you had been asleep before
And how long you will sleep, later.
And
You probably did not give much heed
To how short the number of these days
In which you get to wake up are
Before, of course,
You go back to sleep for good.
Photo by rmathews100 (Pixabay)
The desire to impress others
Is a major impediment to an authentic life.
Put another way;
You can’t really live authentically
That is to say, for something beyond yourself
If some (or much) of your energy is consumed
With the need to impress other people.
Unless of course
Impressing others
Is really what you want to do with your life.
Photo by Giuseppe Milo (www.pixael.com)
We could think of ‘free will’, or ‘personal agency’ not as a binary state
Of, say, ‘complete free will’ or ‘mindless automaton’
We could instead think of it as a ‘continuum’
Or a scale (from 0% to 100%)
Perhaps humans are highest on the scale
(…perhaps)
But do you
(…yes, you)
Do you have ‘100% free will’?
No.
You make your choices
With a
And you were shaped
By environmental circumstances
That
Consider:
The way you recoil automatically from a hot stove
Or ice cold water
Before your conscious mind has the chance to get involved.
Multiple studies of the brain
Have shown that
We make decisions
Before our conscious mind is aware of them
And that the conscious mind
Works a little more like ‘the PR team’
And a less like ‘the president’
Insofar as the conscious mind
Finds ways to justify what was done,
After the decision was made.
Another related point
There seems to be some agreement
Amongst people who are a lot smarter than me
That a certain amount of quantum mechanical randomness
Is ‘built into’ the electrochemical processes of the brain.
Hell
It’s built into everything
But the point still stands
Put another way
It seems that
You’re behind the control panel
And you think you’re pulling the levers
But the device is operating under its own power
And
The device is doing a great job
Of making you think that you’re in control.
Cover Photo by MichaelGaida (Pixabay)
Referring to all ‘non-white people’ as ‘ethnic minorities’
And all ‘non-white culture’ as ‘ethnic’
Reinforces the idea that ‘white’
Is the ‘default’ for everything
And that
All white cultures and people are all the same,
Simply ‘white’.
This ‘normalisation’ of whiteness
(…at the possible expense of everyone else)
It all seems a bit reductionist
This is
Some sort of
That simultaneously homogenises Caucasian culture
While putting everybody else into a ‘non-white’ box
This is,
(…dare I say)
A little racist for everyone involved.
And on another, somewhat related note
If we look at the world as a whole
White people are technically a minority
As the Han Chinese are the largest social group on the planet.
Does this count for anything?
I don’t know.
Photo by afrazeirfan04 (Pixabay)
If you could reassemble a deceased person’s atoms
Back to the exact way that they were
Before the person died
Could you bring them back to life?
People are not here to make your life easier
But you are here to make their lives easier
It would appear that
Nobody ever died
From acute embarrassment.
And yet
Shame is said
To be one of the main causes of suicide.
This is one of the problems
With dwelling on things.
Photo by Go-tea 郭天
Something for Christians to consider:
In the entire account of Jesus’ earthly life
The only thing that really got him angry
Was the financial industry.
I refer, of course, to the ‘cleansing of the temple’.
Consider this
And contrast it to
The popularity of ‘prosperity theology’ today.
Or
How much that modern ‘financialised’ Christian countries
Depend upon commerce and capital.
Assuming that
We didn’t kill or commit him beforehand
What would he make of all this,
