I’ve been ill again this week, which meant slowing down. I read a lot. I reread some, too. A quote from the YA novel Sophie’s World:
The only thing an astrologer can do is predict the past.
That is a call for magic if I ever heard one.
I have been thinking a lot again about the double slit experiment, and how nothing happens in the world until it has been observed. I have been thinking about where I put my attention. And what, by doing so, I help make happen in the world.
So I am off most social media now, which seems to me to be a place of ugliness, outrage and memes that are basically a processes of continual recontextualisation, in a quest to create the greatest possible divide between people.
A democracy can quickly develop into mob rule.
Also from Sophie’s World.
Looking back, I was most creative when I was without a television, and before personal computers. Sometimes lonely. But most often, in a place of solitude. In a place where I thought deeply before I said anything – had an opportunity to say anything – and had time to think twice about it all.
When I had them, social interactions were more than an exchange of witty sound bites. Or an attempt to control what people thought of me.
I had more questions than presumptions then. Even sober, I was more intrigued by the world, than I was suspicious of its motives.
I’ve been thinking about Shakespeare’s “sound and fury”. All our fretting. And what futile noise we make.
I want to observe more in the space between the noise: more of the trees in the wind, more of the birds (who are sheltering in the bushes on this rainy morning).
A soft autumn is settling, and I am going to help conjure it into being.
Be well, Ren. I’ve often thought about finding my own Walden Pond as well, and may yet.
Rex with sniff it out for you. It’s there.
You write that “Looking back, I was most creative when I was without a television, and before personal computers. Sometimes lonely. But most often, in a place of solitude…”
I still have no television, but the computer has changed my solitude and my focus. Other things have, too–raising children, for example, and obtaining and keeping a 40-hr-week job for necessary income.
Sometimes, I recall being 22 and prolifically writing and reading voraciously and being lonesome and taking long walks & writing from that solitude. I almost envy my young self. The time I had!!
Now… (sigh)
Also? Sophie’s World. What a magical and instructive and wild book that is!!
Yeah – I worked then, too. And my children are grown. So now – I feel like maybe I can reclaim some of that. Have you ever read May Sarton’s journal? I hadn’t until this summer. Wow. I am lucky to have a partner, but so much of what she wrote resonated deeply.
It is. But I fear the whole optimism the author had for the UN seems naive now.