Two Kids. One Pony. Hundreds of Miles…

to Montreal's Expo 67.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/03/opinion/pony-boys-montreal-expo-67.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The Next Walk You Take Could Change Your Life

… I realized the main thing preventing a more intimate connection to the natural world was concept — the mysterious filters our mind lodges between us and the world, at every turn, at every second, in just about every interaction. Concepts can be good: We get the concept of "mortal danger" when a car is hurtling toward us. But concepts, also a form of assumption, can neuter experience because pure sensations become impure when we judge them. Concepts are what we deploy when we ask what we can get out of a walk, rather than the opposite.

Researchers who study our brain activity while we walk use the term "automaticity" to describe how our body behaves on a stroll. Automaticity is defined as "the ability of the nervous system to successfully coordinate movement with minimal use of attention-demanding executive control resources."

We should leverage the gift of walking to stop thinking and start doing, apparently, what walking is asking us to do — pay attention to the stuff of place, the place itself. To arrive at that point takes time, and discipline, but when it does, delight bubbles up, a "praising of the mysterious and tender touching we are so often in the midst of," according to Ross Gay, poet and author of "The Book of Delights." Place comes to life, any place, from the life we gave it, from attentiveness.

When I walk, I say, "Now I'm walking." I ring a bell in my mind to get prepared. It doesn't matter if I'm going to the store or for a lunchtime stroll to catch a glimpse of a sexy tree — I know I'm walking. I breathe. I swipe left on everything that tries to lodge itself between me and the world. Pebbles crunch underfoot. Leaves smile in my eyes. Sounds emanate from bottomless wells. The world gets younger, exalted. I see, smell, hear and feel things I didn't before. It's not profound, not magic, but it is impossible to tie a ribbon around.

Not everyone can walk. That capacity may be denied to us at birth, or we can lose mobility over time. But walking is, in the end, a metaphor for being, a place and time — a place-time — gifted to us.

We could all use that gift.

Francis Sanzaro is the author of "Zen of the Wild: A Philosophy for Nature," "Society Elsewhere: Why the Gravest Threat to Humanity Will Come From Within," and other books.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/opinion/walking-mindfulness-benefits.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Albert & Yadi

 So delighted this happened at Dodger Stadium just before the game in which Albert hit #s 699 & 700...

The oldest VR technology

…A shelf of books is a shelf of many lives and ideas and imaginations which the reader can enjoy whenever he wishes and as often as he wishes. Instead of experiencing just one life, the book-lover can experience hundreds or even thousands of lives. He can live any kind of adventure in the world. Books are his time machine into the past and also into the future. Books are his "transporter" by which he can beam instantly to any part of the universe and explore what he finds there. Books are an instrument by which he can become any person for a while—a man, a woman, a child, a general, a farmer, a detective, a king, a doctor, anyone. Great books are especially valuable because a great book often contains within its covers the wisdom of a man or woman's whole lifetime. But the true lover of books enjoys all kinds of books, even some nonsense now and then, because enjoying nonsense from others can teach us to also laugh at ourselves. A person who does not learn to laugh at his own problems and weaknesses and foolishness can never be a truly educated or a truly happy person. Also, probably the same thing could be said of a person who does not enjoy learning and growing all his life...

Gene Roddenberry

https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/i-consider-reading-the-greatest-bargain?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

No gurus

 I always tell students on Opening Day to resist the Guru model of wisdom. Philosophy is collaborative. Authority figures do not appeal. 

"...there is no teacher, no pupil; there is no leader; there is no guru; there is no Master, no Saviour. You yourself are the teacher and the pupil; you are the Master; you are the guru; you are the leader; you are everything." Well, Krishnamurti, I wouldn't go that far.

"People usually come to the front door."

More...

Future of Humanity Institute

	Tim Crane ⁦‪@timcrane102‬⁩ I've seen the Future of Humanity and it is, er, rather homogenous .... oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/future-humanit…   8/21/22, 7:28 AM

Wendell Berry on Delight

 ...as a Force of Resistance to Consumerism, the Key to Mirth Under Hardship, and the Measure of a Rich Life

"I have always had a quarrel with this country not only about race but about the standards by which it appears to live," James Baldwin told Margaret Mead as they sat down together to reimagine democracy for a post-consumerist world. A generation later, the poet, farmer, and ecological steward Wendell Berry — a poet in the largest Baldwinian sense — picked up the time-escalated quarrel in his slim, large-spirited book The Hidden Wound (public library) to offer, without looking away from its scarring realities, a healing and conciliatory direction of resistance to a culture in which our enjoyment of life is taken from us by the not-enoughness at the hollow heart of consumerism, only to be sold back to us at the price of the latest product, and sold in discriminating proportion along lines of stark income inequality... (continues)

Maria Popova

characteristic delight

"Unsurprisingly, the back of Either/Or didn’t say which kind of life was better. All it said was: “Does Kierkegaard mean us to prefer one of the alternatives? Or are we thrown back on the existentialist idea of radical choice?” That had probably been written by a professor. I recognized the professors’ characteristic delight at not imparting information."

Either/Or" by Elif Batuman: https://a.co/4q7yZ0f

If heaven ain't a lot like Wrigley

and Chavez Ravine...

For some of us, heaven would be listening to Harry & Vin forever. https://t.co/KAekdZ99yc

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) August 6, 2022

E B White’s morning dilemma

How do you resolve this, rationally?

https://images.app.goo.gl/B3BMqYE4cLaCFav86

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude