Hi There's a beautiful essay in the November 2004 issue of Harper's magazine about the value of doing nothing. Here's an appetizer:
When I was young, my parents read me Aesop's fable of "The Ant and the Grasshopper," wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn't know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants' door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: "I was singing, if you please," the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. "You were singing?" says the ant. "Well, then, go and sing." And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my hills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a windblown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee. You can find the entire essay here: http://web.ionsys.com/~remedy/Quitting%20The%20Paint%20Factory.htm It speaks to many of the themes in OST, as one of the few tools that explicitly values inaction as a tool for change. Cheers Alex Alexander Kjerulf [email protected] http://www.positivesharing.com http://www.projektarbejdsglaede.dk +45 2688 2373 Tagensvej 126, lejl. 613 2200 København N * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
