Category: meditation

• March 28, 2012

  On holding converse with myself and on taking proper care of myself

  I have been holding two thoughts in mind for quite a while and I now think it’s high time to bring them together. The first thought appears in Book VI of Diogenes Laertius’s The Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Diogenes Laertius relates that “When he [one philosopher named Antisthenes] was asked what advantage had accrued to him…
• March 27, 2012

  On putting life in order

  My article on philosophical practice, “Counselling: Putting Lives in Order,” can now be viewed at The Philosophers’ Magazine website. It appears, appropriately and ironically, in TPM 57, “Philosophy’s Empty Ideas,” after Alain de Botton’s essay on secularists’ need for religion and before Julian Baggini’s interview with Patricia Churchland, a proponent of eliminative materialism. It’s nice…
• March 26, 2012

  Is it possible to have a plan for life?

  Attention is the rarest and purest forms of generosity. –Simone Weil (the quote from Weil was brought to my attention by my friend Carolyn Veith) This past week, one new conversation partner told me, “I had a plan for my life and I didn’t stick to it. Now I feel awful.” Her assumption is that…
• March 24, 2012

  In memoriam Compaq Presario, 2007-12

  This time my Compaq shut down for good. I was about to say hello when all went dark and pixely–all except the well-lit room and the glistening night and the buildings mocking my pixels. My childhood dog had grown glistening eyes and vacant ribs in the years before he died. He died in his sleep…
• March 23, 2012

  ‘I had my regret and so I wrote…’

  I remember it being cold and she was underdressed. That night I offered her my gloves but not my coat. I have since regretted that. It was the Sabbath, Hegel writes, but Jesus paid no heed. He saw the hungry man and plucked an ear of corn, giving it to him. I got reacquainted this…