Dear Readers,
Here is the latest Monday Muse with a meditation from the Dying Every Day series, a perennial reminder, insight, and a recommendation to consider.
Be wise and be well this week!
💀 Dying Every Day
The Dying Every Day series delivers Stoic meditations on the art of living. Each meditation provides a quote, a selected passage (from an original Stoic text), and a daily exercise to contemplate.
“Wherever there is a human being, there exists the opportunity for an act of kindness.”
— Seneca, Moral Letters
***Listen to In Search of Wisdom on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
📌 Perennial Reminder(s)
Accepting that your life is not about you is a Copernican revolution of the mind, and it is just as hard for the individual today as it was for earthbound humans when they discovered that our planet was not the center of the universe. … To know that your life is not about you is a major and monumental shift in consciousness, and it is always given and received with major difficulty. It comes as an epiphany, as a clap of the master’s hand, as pure grace and deliverance, and never as logic or necessary conclusion. Understanding that your life is not about you is the connection point with everything else. […]
Source: Adam’s Return by Richard Rohr
💡 Perennial Insight(s)
One does not come to understand a beehive by studying individual bees and scaling up; instead, one understands an individual bee by understanding how a hive works, and what that bee’s role is therein. You don’t first observe a lot of theatrical roles and then put them all together to figure out what the theatre is; instead, you understand a theatrical role by first knowing about the theatre. The same is true regarding our understanding of persons: one does not come to understand our cultures by understanding how an individual Homo sapiens organism works, and then scaling up; one understands how a person works by understanding our cultures and our multiple roles therein. And there is no place for a self in the story that these analogies suggest. We are too bound up with others for that. […]
Source: Losing Ourselves by Jay Garfield
🔥 Recommendation(s)
This week’s recommendation is an episode from On Being with Krista Tippett. It’s a conversation (from a couple of years ago) that explores the work of love and relationships with Alain de Botton, founder of The School of Life.
Love is something we have to learn and we can make progress with, and that it’s not just an enthusiasm, it’s a skill. And it requires forbearance, generosity, imagination, and a million things besides. The course of true love is rocky and bumpy at the best of times, and the more generous we can be towards that flawed humanity, the better chance we’ll have of doing the true hard work of love.
— Alain de Botton (from the On Being podcast)
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
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Dear Josh, I don’t know if I agree with your statements about the bee and the theater etc. It seems to me that we start out as an infant and we relate to our parents, most of our time spent with our mom. If we are lucky, and we have a loving mom, and dad, who really nurture us, we build on that as we meet other people. We are open to other people and we increase our understanding of our world. If our parents are aloof, or indifferent, or in a worst case scenario, abusive, then we build on that as we meet other people, and we are distrustful or suspicious or afraid. So I’m either on to something here or I’ve missed the point very badly. I would be interested in your thoughts.