Breathe In Strength, Breathe Out Bullshit
Savage / Zen Newsletter | No. 78
If you’re lucky enough to find something to love, do it. It is easy to find something to hate, something to complain about, and any number of routes towards justifying those attitudes.
On the transverse we are responsible for the world we create. It’s a classic liberal shortcoming to have the grandest of ideas with no delivery, no change, just complaints. In case you hadn’t noticed, ideas are not transformative and hope is not a plan.
“When another person makes you suffer,
it is because he suffers deeply within himself,
and his suffering is spilling over.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Where we spend our attention — what we allow to control our focus — dictates our presence, cultivates our experience, and becomes us as we become the world. Action, is transformative.
Anger is an emotion of movement. It’s easy to inspire via anger as evidenced in “the news”, music, or totalitarian regimes regardless of political affiliation — Nazism, PETA, or WBC, etc. Appeals to emotion and authority are some of the most potent logical fallacies used in propaganda.
Turn on any cable news channel, or even Sports Center for that matter, mute the volume, and track the emotions on people’s faces. Hate. Anger. Isn’t there a more productive way to spend our lives?
Inevitably intensity fails, and we must endure. What are we creating for the future? Did we inherit this Earth from our ancestors, or are we renting it from our grandchildren? Are we really surprised when we choose to spend our attention on vitriol, then lo-and-behold that is what we find more of in the world?
You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, so that when it does, you get to be right. Was it worth it, being right?
What’s New:
The Tortoise and the Hare: This is a fascinating article that shows that the proverbial hare (think sea level distance runner) has a very limited range of environment (altitude) where their performance is applicable. However, the proverbial tortoise (think free diver) is able to maintain their cardiovascular output in much more diverse contexts.
Book Club:
“This is for the questions that don’t have any answers, the midnight glancers and the topless dancers… for the crooked cops, and the cluttered desks, for the shots of Jack and the caps of meth, half pints of love and the fifths of stress (ref.).”
If you showed me Bukowski’s poetry by itself the broken grammar and inconsistent structure would make for a forgettable read. However, the biographical stories paint a different picture of a man who truly didn’t give a damn for any social or cultural norms and expectations.
Somewhere between the poets, prostitutes, and drunkards of Los Angeles a noir writer predated the modernist mad men, hippie counter culture, and armchair existentialists and exposed the underbelly of humanity to itself; and unapologetically loved every minute of it.