I ran across a post by my FB friend the author and ornithologist J. Drew Lanham about his "Ten Rules for Going Feral," and I just bet if I googled "ten rules," I'd find more such sets. Well, yes! Starting with Aristotle, from his Nicomachean Ethics:
1. Name your fears and face them.
2. Know your appetites and control them.
3. Be neither a cheapskate nor a spendthrift.
4. Give as generously as you can.
5. Focus more on the transcendent; disregard the trivial.
6. True strength is a controlled temper.
7. Never lie, especially to yourself.
8. Stop struggling for your fair share.
9. Forgive others, and forebear their weaknesses.
10. Define your morality; live up to it, even in private.
I'd say that's all pretty good advice. From a guy who was born in 384 BCE, died in 322. He sure seems a lot smarter than many of our current Congressmen. But don't get me started...
And what, according to Aristotle, are the human virtues? Courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, patience, truthfulness, wittiness, friendliness, shame, and justice. That's a list of 11, but it works—gives food for thought. You can read definitions of each of these terms here. (Maybe I should send this list to the 535 members of Congress... oh wait, I said don't get me started.)
1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher. Pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self disciplined: This means finding someone wise or
smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to
follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow
in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail. There's only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to
something. It is the people who do all the work all the
time who eventually catch onto things.
8. Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.
10. “We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules and how
do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X qualities.”
(John Cage)
Helpful Hints:
Always Be Around.
Come or go to everything.
Always go to classes.
Read everything you can get your hands on.
Look at movies carefully and often.
Save everything—it may come in handy later.
1. Never walk a straight line. Those routes are the institutionalized ones leading to not-so-good ends. Voltage-charged chairs, rooms with forever sleeping beds from which you’ll never arise. Instead follow the flowing irregularities nature draws—the ever-changing splines of surf or shell wrack left by high tide. Track the fox’s four-toed wander along a pond’s muddy margin. Trail the doe’s cloven hopscotch to get nowhere faster than browsing hearts-a-bustin’ will allow. Learn from the swallow and take dips and dives as privileged flight.
2. Wake before the dawn chorus and sing your own song of sunrise.
3. Follow a whippoorwill’s wailing to the dark holler where it calls loneliness, and feel its wanting as your own.
4. Stray away from drama. Let wildness find peace in you.
5. Tell secrets to birds (or butterflies or boulders or bullfrogs or bats) and know they will go no further than the next bird (or butterfly or boulder or bullfrog or bat).
6. Shun concrete. Shutter convention.
7. Feel earth somewhere on your bare human flesh; between toes or fingers, on face or whatever you dare to expose.
8. Be willing to become deer or mouse or thrush or wasp or wildflower. Be fish. Be newt. Be belly low and see the undersides of mushrooms.
9. Curiosity must never wane, but make allowances for ignorant bliss.
10. Stay away from rules that make you otherwise than who [your] heart tells you to be.
He also has a list of "Nine Rules for the Black Birdwatcher," but I'll leave those to you to look up if you are so inclined.
No comments:
Post a Comment