The game between the game

Following a prompt from a friend on a better way to practice this:

I am playing a new game of seeing the negative space.
Seeing the thing as outlined by the not-thing.
Noticing the distances that make things what they are by the nature of the separation.
Seeing the thing as being the outline of the not-thing.
When I write, outlining the not-thing with the thing.
Acknowledging the decisions not made, the roads not traveled, the silence between by which sounds are defined.

The quiet into which what I don't plan can grow.

The world feels much more comfortably full,
when I acknowledge even the stories that don't speak.

The Human Achievement

I'm listening to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning on Audible.
It's the background and description of his school of thought in psychiatry called "logotherapy".

I like the way he describes the "human achievement" as that which a person may produce from a given "predicament".

Turning predicament into a human achievement is the manner in which all people are necessarily artists.  Like any art, it can be practiced, stylized, and honed into a truly respectable craft.

In everything, the uniquely human potential is to paint that layer of perception, interpretation, and chosen response upon the canvas of situation with which we are presented.

It is the art of acknowledging and working with what we cannot change to produce, create, or accept what we can.  We may or may not consider it to be successful, but it is this layer of perception and response that would not arise in any other way, and thus, in its uniqueness, is a human achievement.

I am reminded of the quote at the beginning of Steinbeck's Cannery Row.
And Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

continue (meaning of life resolved, next question please)

Walking the evening streets of Shanghai,

Harbin beers in hand,

(considering the All as an informational map in 1s and 0s
the "things" that we know as selected groupings of those,
and a human drive to uncover meaning like an algorithm tasked with revealing its own code)

is as good a place as any

to be reminded that one's "purpose" in life is to be,

to be uniquely,

and so being,

continue.



Thank you.