It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.
This post first appeared on my dev blog at dinobansigan.com. It was published back in 01/28/2019. I've updated the post and moved it here as it was not really a software development or tech related post.
A few days ago I heard an ad on TV that said something like, “people say less is more, but more is REALLY MORE!” Obviously, the intent of that ad is to get you to spend more money. We live in a world where people are judged by their material possessions. The narrative being, if you have more, then you are living a better life compared to everyone else around you. That is ridiculous.
So often we want more. We have been trained to think more is better. More money. More stuff. More success. But this idea of getting and doing more often gets in the way of our goals.
~ Dan Erickson
Walking is increasingly mediated by technological gadgets worn on wrists or gripped in hands. We spend an increasing amount of time ‘screening’ the world – taking in most of life through a contracted frame that captures objects of immediate interest. To live with eyes on the screen is to be attached, stuck in the frame, taking in what is presented to us and re-presented to us again. But representation – even in fine-grained pixilation – is not experience. To experience is to perceive. When we look at a screen, we might see something, but we don’t perceive. To live life through representations is to live passively, to receive rather than to experience.
I am so grateful that I discovered the IndieWeb. Owning my content and posting my thoughts on my own site instead of a silo like Twitter gives me real freedom. I can decide how my thoughts are displayed (I like to make them available to everyone without advertising), I can edit them and they stay available for as long as I want.
People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.
It was a particular joy for me to visit the sites associated with St. Ignatius of Loyola on a recent film trip. But the most moving locale was a little church in Manresa built around the cave where the young Ignatius spent about nine months preparing himself spiritually for his life’s work. What he learned at Manresa is that our attachments to various created goods—money, power, pleasure, and honor—stand in the way of our responding to God’s will for us.
~ Bishop Barron
A really good homily that talks about the practice of “Agere Contra”, which means “To act against”. I believe that you can apply “Agere Contra” to most things in life. You don't have to be religious to practice it. For instance, I can see the practice of “Agere Contra” being very effective against social media and smartphone addiction.
Great read on the definitions of love and mercy, and how both could affect our society.
The picture of a society without mercy reminds me of something I heard about mercy defined linguistically. The Hebrew word associates the experience with pregnancy. Mercy is like being pregnant. “Bearing with” the other in mercy requires genuine selflessness.
That's a wonderful description of mercy.
“Others are out there” means that mercy requires love as defined by Iris Murdoch. She says, “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than yourself is real.” Love initiates and invites mercy
I've come to a similar conclusion. If love is “willing the good of others” as Bishop Barron so often says, then there cannot be mercy without love. So, for our society to be merciful, we must first love each other. Only then will mercy manifest itself.
I encourage you to be conscious of the fact that the electronic/digital world is not really a natural world. It might be becoming our new norm, especially in the current pandemic. But we should always make a point to step away from these unnatural options.
Instead, take a hike, view the night sky, listen to live music, breathe the fresh air.
This was a good read. And to his point, I never even thought about that. How much time do we spend at night browsing or living on the internet? I'm guilty of this too, what with the multiple blogs and websites that I try to keep up with at night. The time we spend at nights living on the internet, means time spent not living in the natural world. Something to think about that.
As Seneca points out, “We are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.” A minute is long if you know how to use it. A week is plenty of time if you don’t waste it.
I thought this was an extremely good read. If you are a fan of Stoicism, you'll find much to like here. And even if you are not a fan, there is still so much good information here. The kind that you could use right away.
Reading this has made me interested in finding out more about Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. From the quotes I've read on Seneca, he seems to be this old guy full of common-sense wisdom that he imparts in sometimes hilarious fashion. Marcus Aurelius on the other hand, was like this serious, principled and disciplined authority figure. Figures, he was only emperor of Rome at some point in time.
As one of my college professors used to say, “Giving is not giving until it hurts.” This story is a good example of that. But more than that, I think this is also an example of God knowing what we need, way before we even realize it.
Was it purely coincidence that the scarf was where it was at that exact moment in time? Hmm maybe.
But what if it wasn't? If it wasn't, then it is like the author says. It was God showing up in a scarf to comfort him and help him deal with his loss. I think this is an amazing story if that was the case.
Lastly, some sort of realization. If it was me in the author's situation, I'm not sure that I would have been generous enough to give the scarf away. But I think that's an indication of how attached I am to personal and material things in this world. Something I need to work on then.
This post is Day 43 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.
If you’re one of these people, opening a book might have become something to do when you haven’t got anything else going on, which is almost never. It’s as if you decided at some point, likely without conscious thought, that even though you love books, book reading is effectively the least important thing in your life – you’ll squeeze it in, if you can.
I have a feeling that a lot of it has to do with the smartphones in our pockets. At least, that's what I struggle with from time to time.
Reason #2: filtering out information takes effort.
Contrary to common sense, ignoring things is not a passive mental process.
Researchers have found that it takes energy to ignore irrelevant stimuli.
In other words, ignoring something still takes a toll on your mental stamina. Think of it this way, we wake up in the morning and our mental stamina bar is at 100% full. If you have to go through the day trying to ignore irrelevant stimuli, your mental stamina bar will probably be down to 50% by lunchtime. By the time you go home, it may be down to 10%. Then you end up just getting fast food because you can't think of anything else better to eat. And you crash down on your sofa to binge-watch Netflix, because your brain is too tired to do something else.