What if we could augment the bucket-list of typical New Year’s
resolutions, dominated by bodily habits and pragmatic daily practices, with
higher-order aspirations — habits of mind and spiritual orientations borrowed
from some of humanity’s most timelessly rewarding thinkers? After the 2015
selection of resolutions inspired by such
luminaries as Seneca, Maya Angelou, Bruce Lee, and Virginia Woolf, here are
sixteen equally worthwhile resolutions for 2016 borrowed from a new roster of
perennially elevating minds.
Adrienne Rich: Cultivate Honorable Relationships
One of the most influential poets of the
twentieth century and a woman of unflinching conviction, Adrienne Rich, became
the first and to date only person to decline the National Medal of Arts in protest against the growing monopoly of power and the
government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the
Arts.
her poetry collection The Dream Of A Common Language is a cultural cornerstone and required
reading for every thinking, feeling human being, her lesser-known collected
prose, published as On
Lies, Secrets, and Silence pours forth Rich’s most direct insight into
the political, philosophical, and personal dimensions of human life.
According to her, An honorable human
relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word
“love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons
involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
Soren
Kierkegaard: Raising Absent minded busyness
He is considered the first true existentialist
philosopher, remains a source of enduring wisdom on everything from the psychology of bullying to the vital role of bordom to why we conform.
According to him,Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous
seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work.
Rainer Maria Rilke: Live the Question
According to him, to have patience with everything unresolved
in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were
locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the
answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to
live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps
then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
Susan Sontag: Pay Attention To the World
According to her, if there is something I think writersought to do, and recently in an interview I
heard myself say: “Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay
attention to the world.”
Bartrand Russel: Make Room For Fruitful Monotony
According to him, We
are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We
have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the
natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of
excitement.
Ursula Guin: Refuse to Play the perfection Game
According to her, There are a whole lot of ways to be
perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.
Erich Fromm: Master the art of loving
According to her, Love is not a sentiment which can be easily
indulged in by anyone, regardless of the level of maturity reached by him…
[All] attempts for love are bound to fail, unless [one] tries most actively to
develop [one’s] total personality, so as to achieve a productive orientation;
…satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to
love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and discipline. In a
culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of the capacity to
love must remain a rare achievement.
Anne Truitt: Choose understading over judgement
According to her, Unless we are very, very careful, we doom
each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that
are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves. This
indifference can be, in its extreme, a form of murder and seems to me a rather
common phenomenon. We claim autonomy for ourselves and forget that in so doing
we can fall into the tyranny of defining other people as we would like them to
be. By focusing on what we choose to acknowledge in them, we impose an
insidious control on them. I notice that I have to pay careful attention in
order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are,
or as they think themselves to be. The shutters of my mind habitually flip open
and click shut, and these little snaps form into patterns I arrange for myself.
The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way
that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.
Simone Weil: Make use of suffering
According to her,The way to make use of physical pain. When
suffering no matter what degree of pain, when almost the entire soul is
inwardly crying “Make it stop, I can bear no more,” a part of the soul, even
though it be an infinitesimally small part, should say: “I consent that this
should continue throughout the whole of time, if the divine wisdom so ordains.”
The soul is then split in two. For the physically sentient part of the soul is
— at least sometimes — unable to consent to pain. This splitting in two of the
soul is a second pain, a spiritual one, and even sharper than the physical pain
that causes it.
James Baldwin:Tell the world how to treat you
According to him, how in the world am I going
to explain to him that there is virtually no way for me to have found out where
I came from in Africa? So it is a kind of tug of war. The black American is
looked down on by other dark people as being an object abjectly used. They envy
him on the one hand, but on the other hand they also would like to look down on
him as having struck a despicable bargain.
John Steinbeck: Use discipline to catalyze creative magic
habit seems to be a much stronger force than
either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality
of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is
established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, “I’ll do it if
I feel like it.” One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the
smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there
are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every
day whether they are any good or not.
Martha Nussabaum: Heed
the intelligence of the emotions
A lot is at stake in the decision to view
emotions in this way, as intelligent responses to the perception of value. If
emotions are suffused with intelligence and discernment, and if they contain in
themselves an awareness of value or importance, they cannot, for example,
easily be sidelined in accounts of ethical judgment, as so often they have been
in the history of philosophy. Instead of viewing morality as a system of
principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations
that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we
will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical
reasoning. We cannot plausibly omit them, once we acknowledge that emotions
include in their content judgments that can be true or false, and good or bad
guides to ethical choice. We will have to grapple with the messy material of
grief and love, anger and fear, and the role these tumultuous experiences play
in thought about the good and the just.
Gracy paley: master the art of growing older
Perhaps the greatest perplexity of aging is how
to fill with gentleness the void between who we feel we are on the inside and
who our culture tells us is staring back from that mirror
Friedrich Nietzsche:
Walk your own path
Any human being who does not wish to be part of
the masses need only stop making things easy for himself. Let him follow his
conscience, which calls out to him: “Be yourself! All that you are now doing,
thinking, desiring, all that is not you.”
Martha Graham: Embrace your divine dissatisfaction
“Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that
comes from never being satisfied,
Kurt Vonnegut: Celebrate your
enoughness
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!
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