finely-tempered departures
it's raining today. it seems that she should be feeling depressed along with an assortment of additional negative emotions; however, today she's noticed that some of the fear and guilt and depressive thought patterns have more or less evaporated upon contact with her consciousness. it's the departure of self-pity as merton articulates it, and in einstein's words it's the becoming to a finely-tempered nature or in nietzche's language it's having a healthy heart:
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost...Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny ourselves. But a person who is truly humble cannot despair, because in a humble person there is no longer any such thing as self-pity. ~thomas merton~
a finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought. ~albert einstein~
the thousand mysteries around us would not troulble us but interest us, if only we had cheerful, healthy hearts. ~friedrich nietzsche~
it's raining, but it's warm enough to wear flip-flops...so her feet, if nothing else, are experiencing the freedom that comes from not being self-absorbed. even though it's raining, today is a good day.
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost...Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny ourselves. But a person who is truly humble cannot despair, because in a humble person there is no longer any such thing as self-pity. ~thomas merton~
a finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought. ~albert einstein~
the thousand mysteries around us would not troulble us but interest us, if only we had cheerful, healthy hearts. ~friedrich nietzsche~
it's raining, but it's warm enough to wear flip-flops...so her feet, if nothing else, are experiencing the freedom that comes from not being self-absorbed. even though it's raining, today is a good day.
