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"intellectual training, physical training, virtue training, ki training-these produce practical wisdom." He added that it wouldn't do for even one of these to be missing, that lacking any one of them would render everything for naught and inevitably slow one's overall development. One must, he told me, always maintain a harmonious balance among these.
This was borrowed from the link above. I read it and felt compelled to copy it on my blog because it seems to capture that certain je ne sais quoi of my raison d'etre.
When confronted by the simple truth of these words I can't help but know that my practice is definately lacking.
I'm sitting here bouncing on my exercise ball with my 2-month old son, watching the Daily Show and contemplating the fate of the world. You know, small stuff. After reading about nuclear disasters, watching a show on megaquakes, and watching politicians whip people into mindless sound-bite derived frenzies, it's hard not to worry about the fate of my two sons. Then I think about all the huge dreams I had as a younger man and compare them with the "lesser" realities I made happen (despite having had a lot of support), it becomes easy to get discouraged; to become a fatalist; to see 2012 as some doomsday period.
Life is complicated; life is simple. It's unfathomable in any real depth, and I sincerely believe we're just a bunch of big-brained (neurotic) apes slapping labels on things so our minds can feel like we have it figured out...at least, figured out enough...long enough for us to build a new tool with which to break more nuts to stuff in our gullets.
And this is where my idealism tends to kick in. I look at the roughly 11,000 years of history we've scraped together out of the sands of deserts (a blink's worth on the whole); I look at the astounding level of tool development we've acquired in the last 100 years, let alone the curve seen in the last 30; I see how my 2-year old learns things I thought he wasn't paying attention to and my 2-month old smiles at me almost every time I say hi (it's not gas!); I see people building themselves up and the (corny as it may sound
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09-19-2011 01:32 AM 
