Pure Arabic Nights Comments

LIFE IS NOT BAD BUT SIMPLE - Im often find life in the abstract GOOD but I rarely find it SIMPLE. The 34 years I was a high school teacher from 7 am to 3 pm five days a week were hectic with stress and my personal life was complicated. At the beginning of his wonderful book WALDEN, one of the greatest written by an American, Henry David Thoreau says, Simplify, simplify, simplify. Oh, how I tried to follow his example! And the complexity of trying to find a partner for life! Ha! I cultivated friendships with women, did not put pressure on them in sexual matters (which was just common decency in my view) , and when I look back I see many wonderful things and a lot of frustration. And now I can look further back. My core values are solid but I still have the nagging sense of lost opportunities. Emerson said no one past the age of 30 can wake up in a perfect mood: there will always be regrets, fears, unfulfilled desires. And he wrote that in the 1830s! ! Thoreau was his friend, but Thoreau was a secular saint. The hope and excellence you feel in St. John of Krogstadt I feel in Thoreau, and yet I can't achieve his evenness of temper, his simple access to joy, his patience with events unfolding according to their own timetable. But here I am doing what Thoreau did not do, that is, judging my life in the short term, instead of saying, Be patient, follow what you know to be the good path, do not prejudge, take delight in what you are given and stop obsessing over what you have not been given. There! I just wrote a passage Thoreau might have written, thinking as he wrote, Life will be more complicated in 150 years, and those people will need sympathy, yes, but also a stern reminder that regret and self-pity and day-dreaming are not the nature of life - activity and productive labor and a happy disposition, those are the things that make up Life on Earth! So first and foremost, be a good Earthling, love your Mother Earth, let her embrace you with her cornucopia, and you there, Daniel, the rest is silence. Right? !