To Live Well
You have to take risks
Risk failure
Risk looking stupid
Risk admitting you haven’t got the skills
Risk personal embarrassment
Risk making mistakes
Risk offending people
That’s the only way you can learn
To succeed
To be smart
To acquire skills
To know what you’re worth
To avoid mistakes
To make people happy
Assuming you pay attention
That’s Socrates. Also what Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell suggest doing with the Work…the best method of examination I know. Simple, direct, and life changing. Ask anyone who’s known me years ago how I have become a happy person….The Work.
And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.
Anais Nin
You both nailed it !
Thanks, I do enjoy reading Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Lao Tzu (and Ursula Guin and Wytter Bynner and …).
Yes. My friend Hamsa, Howie Seidell, now gone and still missed, often shared and discussed Stephen Mitchell’s Tao Te Ching with me. Seems to have been, and maybe still is, another commonality of life on the Coast. “The world is sacred. It can’t be improved. If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.” (29)
“Risk failure
Risk looking stupid
Risk admitting you haven’t got the skills
Risk personal embarrassment
Risk making mistakes
Risk offending people
That’s the only way you can learn”
Also a great way to become friendless, jobless and even homeless! The luxury of taking all these “risks” seems available only to the affluent, does not apply to the low income, the poor, and others who are downtrodden. I mean: would the concentration camp prisoners of Nazi Germany have benefited by such an ideology? Furthermore:
Just what the heck does an “examined life” mean? How does that work for a young black man in Chicago with little hope for a decent life, whose best friend has just been murdered by a cop…or a homeless old lady pushing her shopping cart along skid row? (Just a couple of examples of a myriad of tragic cases that are ever increasing in this nation…not to mention all the poverty and horrors in a large chunk of the rest of the world.)
Ah yes, the examined life. Only the affluent need apply. Now, read this “[Don’t] Think in the Morning” piece and pat each other on the back, you elitist middle-class monkeys. The “unexamined” life, my ass.
Nice napkin art, though, as usual.