Wisdom

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved.

It need not be only the likes of engineers, politicians, and entrepreneurs who have a hand in shaping the world and its things, for we are all specialists in at least a small corner of the world of things.

To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems of extreme difficulty, which he has to solve with the means at his disposal. And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of—such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilised amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity. This is particularly disconcerting to him, because he has been frequently told that the increase of scientific knowledge would give him “the mastery over nature”—which ought, surely, to imply mastery over life.

Perhaps the first thing that he can learn from the artist is that the only way of “mastering” one’s material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant. If he tries to wrest life out of its true nature, it will revenge itself in judgment, as the work revenges itself upon the domineering artist.

The journey begins by letting go of control, and becoming flexible.

Aang: When we hit our lowest point, we are open to the greatest change.

If you are having trouble knowing where to start, always start at the doorstep.

The novice goes astray and says, “The art has failed me.”
The master goes astray and says, “I have failed my art."

It is when one forces principles on the world that one interferes with its natural workings.

It is hard to give up preconceptions of what things “ought to be,” and recognize things as they really are.

Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me.

This was never any place I was meant to be.

Diderot’s solution to the limits of language was to become himself a worker.

Become an apprentice and produce bad results so as to be able to teach people how to produce good ones.

We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one’s life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquility and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be trustworthy, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs.

This remains largely theory, but my best guess as to his never dispensing wisdom like other dads is that my father understood that advice—even wise advice—actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path.