vonderwueste said to dmb: You observed that life can seem pointless and repetitious ( in Detroit, for example ). I think we can agree that you are observing a low quality static holding pattern. I claim that your observation implies the hypothesis: There must be a better way. I further claim that the only way to test this hypothesis is to live differently. dmb says:Oh, you're talking about my Detroit complaints. I see. For whatever it's worth, I found a better way. I moved to Denver after college, where people don't live like that. Not the people I know anyway. It has a different culture. People spend time outdoors, the population is highly educated and a lot of my friends are artists and such. I felt at home right away and now I'm studying philosophy instead of working in a factory or whatever. As far as I'm concerned, this is definitely a better way.
vonderwueste said:Therefore talking, or hypothesizing, might be a necessary first step towards a higher quality situation, but it is insufficient. One needs gumption. And gumption is where the rubber meets the road. Gumption is action. Gumption is taking chances. ...My point in all of this is that the moq is meaningless if it is not actually applied in some living way. dmb says:A phrase from John Dewey springs to mind. Like Pirsig, he's a pragmatist and a radical empiricist. He said something like, "thought is action suspended". If were not stuck and things are working there is no need for thought. But when a problem comes up and we get stuck it's time to step back and look at the situation. Getting stuck stops us in our tracks and we need to look at what's wrong. This applies to little things like weird noises coming from the motorcycle, that little voice in the back of your head and to larger, collective stuckness too. And in the case of the hero's journey, this is how the story begins. The would-be hero has a problem. You know, like Willard in that Saigon hotel room. Like Dorothy in those opening scenes. Like Luke Skywalker on that wasteland of a planet, where he's stuck on the farm. In all those cases, the protagonist can't just keep on acting in the same old ways or they'll never get unstuck. If they just keep doing what they're doing instead of figuring out a way to solve their problem, they're doomed. And, yes, some people just go through life like that. They go to work, take a vacation every now and then and do all the things that normal people do, but they're stuck. It's a rut. It's not working. And yet nothing changes. And then they die. The great funeral procession. The unexamined life is not worth living AND the unlived life is not worth examining. Don't you think? _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage1_052009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
