Category: philosophical counseling

• April 22, 2013

  The wisdom of one-liners

  Wisdom comes not in but through one-liners. The throughway is the entire expanse of a life of investigation which has been worked and shaped and magnified–like a vast, refined conclusion–into a single intuition. Condensed in that straight, parabolic line is the sinuous beauty of the speaker’s grainy union with the gulping, glorious cosmos. Hold to…
• April 19, 2013

  Knocking one hell of a squeeze out of life

  John O’Donohue: What would you say about the whole thing now that you’re about to leave it? [And this big roguish smile crossed his visage.] The Man on his Deathbed: By Jesus, I knocked a hell of a squeeze out of it. The Irishman’s words are goodness lifted into beauty. It is the light humor exemplified…
• April 18, 2013

  Hurry up: A parable

  Two men spend exactly two minutes looking at the cross section of a cutdown tree. Both men have the same sensory equipment (eyes, ears, tongues, etc.). Both have the same cognitive equipment (capacity for concentrating, attending,  inferring, etc.). Both are walking at the same rate and that rate is such as not to prove laborious…
• April 17, 2013

  Discerning ‘when it’s time’

  No one can tell you ‘when it’s time,’ but you must become discerning. Pick up clues. Amass them. Clues are not grains of sand. Discern when they amount to something and when to nothing. Then–go to!–change yourself or change course. Make haste lest you slink into retreat. You think I am telling you ‘when it’s…
• April 16, 2013

  Nagel on Aristotle on identifying with the ‘highest part of ourselves’

  What is the ergon of human beings, asks Thomas Nagel in his essay on Aristotle’s eudaimonia, for the answer to the question of how to live hangs on this. The ergon (function) of the hammer is to pound in nails; a poor hammer may be too heavy to wield, too flimsy, too poor at pound…