Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

the “r” word

...and everything else, Bioethics

Oiy! Obviously I’m tired – my brain is coming up with brilliance hours after it’s needed! The next time I’m asked for suggestions about what video clips to use to illustrate bedside rationing, someone make sure I remember Survivor!

(This is what happens when I start re-reading Multitude. Voluntarily. Brain synapses just start committing suicide, thinking they’ll get it over with earlier rather than latter. By the end of the weekend, I doubt I’ll be able to form a coherent sentence. But man, I’ll have cool ideas…)

when through water’s thickness

...and everything else, life and living, wisdom and folly

When through the water’s thickness I see the tiling at the bottom of a pool, I do not see is despite the water and the reflections there, I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without this flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is — which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place. I cannot say that the water itself — the aqeous power, the syrupy and shimmering element — is in space; all this is not somewhere else, either, but it is not in the pool. It inhabits it, it materializes itself there, yet it is not contained there; and if I raise my eyes toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections is playing, I cannot gainsay the fact that the water visits it, too, or at least sends into it, upon it, its active and living essence.
-Merleau-Ponty

the hardest thing in this world is to… trust in it?

...and everything else, blog as therapy, life and living

I think that perhaps the hardest thing in this world is not to live in it, is not to be trustworthy, but simply to trust.

To trust is a daily requirement. We trust our milk won’t be contaminated, that our cereal will just contain cereal (or our pet food won’t have pesticides), that the mailman will actually deliver our checks, that the person we opt to confide in over lunch won’t laugh, that our friends have our best interests at heart. We know the laws that require milk to be pasteurized, and our food to be inspected for and created in safety; it’s our trust in people that is so fascinating. Laws, although useful for setting up social contracts, cannot dictate things as minute as trust in an individual. Yet, as Alfonso Lingis notes, everywhere a person turns in the web of human activities, he touches upon solicitations to trust, a field of options of yes and no to be navigated, not in isolated decisions, but as part of a greater whole.

Hmm…I feel the sudden urge to re-read Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Every Day Life.