Hazy Sunrise. Six photos between 6:29 to 6:50 a.m. 67° F. August 16, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More pictures from this morning’s walk at Cove Island Park here: 1) Twilight and 2) Brody and Wally Play Date.
Notes:
Post inspired by: “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery — air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.” — Sylvia Plath, “The Bell Jar” (Heinemann, 1963) (via Make Believe Boutique)
Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”
There are a finite number of times we get to do anything and after the first time it’s a count. We only get to look at the sky so many times in a life. There are a finite number of rainstorms and seasons that we’ll witness, and the number seems so big until it doesn’t. We never know when will be the last time we taste something or see someone or do anything at all. And for all the money in the world, time is not for sale no matter what the doctors say when we beg for more of it toward the end, finally seeing that we forgot to count the raindrops.
To start today on a path toward enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, consider the possibility that you don’t need to learn anything new. Instead, you may want to unlearn some false lessons that have pervaded the culture over the past few years. The first untruth is that you must know your destination; the second is that a good life is one that minimizes suffering; and the third is that you must know and live your own truth. The Dominican sages and the modern scientists together show that these are all fake news and serious impediments to a happy life.
In their place, I suggest that you start your path of life by repeating each morning these three affirmations:
I do not know what this day will bring, but I will live it the best I can, with an attitude of love and generosity.
I am grateful for the good I experience today, but I do not fear the bad, which is part of being alive and an opportunity for learning and growth.
I do not possess the absolute truth, but today I will seek it with honesty, an open heart, and a spirit of adventure.
…You will notice that all of the modern untruths I’ve identified have one big thing in common: They say you should focus on yourself—your future, your career, your discomfort, your truth. All moral teaching aside, how boring is that? I can think of no better way to miss the awesome majesty of life than to focus egotistically on a psychodrama in which you are the star.
Happy people can zoom out to see and fully enjoy the world around them. But that means standing up to the lie that you are the center of things. That is the essence of humility and a great secret to happiness. We could add one more affirmation to complete the list above: I will focus today on the miraculous world outside myself.
— Arthur C. Brooks, from “Some Dominican Wisdom We Can All Use” (The Atlantic, May 23, 2024). Adapted from the commencement speech delivered on May 19, 2024, at Providence College, a Catholic institution founded by Dominican friars.
And here I go, 1,292 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak morning walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.
There she stood on the dock, a Great Blue Heron, vigilant, stoic, absorbing a light drizzle.Waiting. Waiting. Waiting for what?
I walk.
Compared to yesterday’s magical sunrise, today, TODAY, was just painfully uninspiring — with the bonus of rain spitting all over the camera gear. It took all of me, all that I had, to keep forward motion and not take a u-turn back to the exit.
I walk.
A supersized BK soft drink cup lay on the path, teethmarks on the recyclable straw where the pollutant ingested the soda. Trash bins everywhere around this park, yet here it is. “I’m still willing to buy that life is beautiful if you dress it up right, that people are basically good, or that love can save you. I still want to believe.” (Jonathan Evison, Again and Again )Continue reading “Walking. It is so easy to forget…”→
At church a baby girl was baptized. She lay quietly in the vicar’s arms, absorbed in contemplation of things around her, her eyes very wide and bright, her hands spread like stars.
