Long Day

“It’s not easy being green.”

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

~ Pearl S. Buck

Me Look Pretty One Day

“There’s the ideal beauty of youth and health, which never really changes, and is always true. There’s the ideal beauty of movie stars and advertising models, the beauty-game ideal, which changes its rules all the time and from place to place, and is never entirely true. And there’s an ideal beauty that is harder to define or understand, because it occurs not just in the body but where the body and the spirit meet and define each other.”

~Ursula K. Le Guin (from “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty”)

Here Today

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

~Buddha

Do it anyway

Man looks in the abyss. There’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And that is what keeps him out of the abyss.

~from Wall Street

Zen Love

One evening, after a Dharma talk at the Cambridge Zen Center, a student asked Seung Sahn Soen-sa, “What is love?”

Soen-sa said, “I ask you: what is love?”

The student was silent.

Soen-sa said, “This is love.”

The student was still silent.

“Soen-sa said, “You ask me, I ask you. This is love.”

Perspective

Yesterday you climbed
To the top of the Empire State Building
(By elevator, mostly, but
There were a few steps here and there.)
You circled the observation deck,
Feet shuffling over old stone,
Hands gripping iron safety bars,
Like those of a prison cell
With a billion dollar view.

You could see so much from there,
Except for you yourself—
So improbably aloft,
Tracing the edge of the precipitous building,
Scraping the cerulean sky.

Today you lie in bed
Writing poetry,
Once again seeking the spectacular,
Once again not knowing it’s you.

BBC’s “Life” and “Frozen Planet”

For those of us who loved Planet Earth and Planet Earth II, two more phenomenal nature series…

The Perils of Expertise – Vol. 2

More Perils of Expertise—traits that enhance expertise yet detract from other parts of life—in this case, those of the writer of fiction, screenplays and other stories…

How To Be a Great Writer and an Unhappy Human

1. Dwell on the past.
2. Edit yourself.
3. Look for conflict/drama.
4. Ponder the imponderable. Excessively.
5. Draw comparisons.
6. Try to put everything into words.

The Perils of Expertise

Most of us strive to be good at something (or two things, or more). Some of us strive to be great. Being very good at something can be fun and rewarding. Yet there are perils.

Regardless of natural ability, achieving any measure of expertise requires training over a long period of time. Some say 10,000 hours, though in my opinion it depends on how you use them. After so much time, you develop certain mental habits, unconscious tendencies, which are a critical part of the foundation of your expertise.

Ironically, though, these same habits can make you unhappy when applied in other aspects of your life, and it can be extremely difficult to turn these habits off when you’re not conducting the activity that requires them. As a result, you end up with a list of traits that can make you both good at your expertise and unhappy in life.

These traits vary, depending on the type of expert (athlete, surgeon, marketer, physicist, musician, etc.) Take, for example, the business lawyer—an expert (one hopes) at negotiating deals and reviewing and drafting legal contracts…

How To Be a Great Business Lawyer and an Unhappy Human

1. Dwell on the unknowable future (“What if this happens? Or this? Or this?”)
2. Assume the worst, in all its hypothetical permutations (“Are we protected if things go bad in this way? Or in this way?”)
3. Constantly worry over the details.
4. Be defensive.
5. Second-guess yourself and others.
6. Focus on pitfalls, vulnerabilities and flaws, rather than on what is good.
7. Be afraid to make mistakes.