What is the Measure of a Day's Worth?

When you get to the end of the working day and you get home to be met by your partner and asked 'Did you have a nice day?' how do you arrive at your answer? (Assuming that you do not give the all too frequent, bland and automatic response of 'Oh. Fine.')

Do you, evaluate your day by...

...how much you have done?
(That could be either how much you have done for your employer or for yourself in your employer's time!)

...how much you have earned or been paid?

...how little you have done (while still getting paid the daily rate)?

...how many (or how few) people you have seen?

...how mentally stimulating it has been?

There are many more suggestions that one might make. Perhaps the real question is 'Do you evaluate your day or just get through it without giving it much thought?'


As you start a new year, asking this question may put things into a different perspective.

Why are you here? - 2

Last month, I asked 'Why are you here? - 1'. I ask again with a different response.

How about...

"Your job in life is to seek and find the one thing that is enduring; the one thing that will not go away - that cannot go away - that cannot let you down."


And with that...

MERRY CHRISTMAS - 2015.

Epictetus - 9

From: The Golden Sayings of Epictetus (translated by Hastings Crossley) - from Project Gutenberg.

XCVI
Pittacus wronged by one whom he had it in his power to punish, let him go free, saying, Forgiveness is better than revenge. The one shows native gentleness, the other savagery.

Advice to a young poet... and to others

I found this interesting, even enticing. In this season of gregariousness, it is worth considering the following.

"...What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about what they were doing.

"And when you realize that their activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own world, from the vastness of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from."

(From Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet' (#6))

So what if you are not a poet. That's only what a grownup would say.

Found (source unknown)

"First, the question of why there is something rather than nothing is neither silly nor just of interest to philosophers and 'armchair speculators'. Second, like all good philosophy, by the end of the journey the prize is not necessarily getting an answer, but rather consists in gaining a much richer and more nuanced understanding of the question."


(Found among my loose notes made years ago.)