Theodore Roosevelt’s Praise of Imperfect Heroes
Scott Barry Kaufman republishes Theodore Roosevelt's challenge to those whose sense of achievement is based only on sitting on the sidelines and taking potshots.
That Feeling that One Must Inevitably Pass the Torch
Calendars don't lie. I've already used up most of the 1,000 months I'm ever going to have on the planet.
As an older dad, I took quite an interest in Rikki Schlott’s New York Post article about her relationship with her 84-year old dad. Reading this caused me to pause and hope that I’ve helped to give my two daughters (both now in their mid-20's) the tools they need to thrive in this insane world. Rikki, BTW, is, at the age of 22, co-author of a best-selling new book on the scourge of cancel culture: The Canceling of the American Mind. An excerpt:
My dad’s breadth of life experience and wisdom woke me to the transience of today’s fads and fallacies. It’s hard to humor my peers who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings when my best friend remembers the plights of World War II. It’s impossible to flirt with socialist politics when my father recalls the rise and fall of the USSR. It’s hard to spend my days scrolling through TikTok when my dad is a living testament to the wisdom a lifetime of reading can foster.
Having an older father also means it’s difficult to swallow the victim mentality of many of my contemporaries. While Generation Z indulges in identity politics and intersectionality, it’s an attitude my father would never accept from me. He’s a self-made man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Now that he’s provided me with an education and life beyond what he could imagine growing up on a goose farm, I won’t rest until I make the most of all the opportunities I’ve been given and do him proud.
17 Life-Learnings to Celebrate the 17th Birthday of Maria Popova’s “The Marginalian”
This morning I received 17 wonderful gifts. Maria Popova’s website has been one of my places of respite for many years. In her most recent article, she celebrates her 17 years of online writing at “The Marginalian” by crystallizing 17 lessons she has learned along the way. Here is Maria’s introduction to her 17 lessons:
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.)
What follows are merely the titles to Popova's 17 lessons. She discusses each of these more fully at her website. Everything she writes is, somehow, both analytically precise and poetic. I've printed this list and it has gone up on my wall so that I have daily reminders:
1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone
3. Be generous.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life.
5. You are the only custodian of your own integrity.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.”
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.
10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively.
11. Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.
12 There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again.
14. Choose joy.
16. Unself.
17.Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.
Joe Biden Continues to Refuse Secret Service Protection to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
I posted on this topic about a week ago but I'm posting again because the behavior of the Biden White House is despicable. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s father and uncle were assassinated. RFK, Jr. was almost murdered last week. Presidents have always granted Secret service protection to opposing candidate, who requested it, until now. I'm to the point where there is no innocent explanation for the behavior of the White House. Please watch this short video. Don't skip over the beginning where Gavin de Becker describes his noteworthy credentials.
You Are Your World
Niel Theise, via Maria Popova:
While we feel ourselves to be thinking, living beings with independent lives inside the universe, the complementary view is also true: we don’t live in the universe; we embody it. It’s just like how we habitually think of ourselves as living on the planet even as, in a complementary way, we are the planet.[…]
You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge, Planck moment by Planck moment.