Discovery
Doubt is the father of discovery.
— Galileo
Galileo paid a heavy price for his doubt. It is inspiring to know that he held to its efficacy.
Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
— David Foster Wallace
Listen to that still, quite voice in the back of the mind. It might be your destiny trying to get your attention.
What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Like most children, my parents raised me with an unending plea to always tell the truth. In my mom’s eyes, a clean conscience was to be valued above all else. “Besides,” she always said, “if you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said.” I have carried this commitment to truth and honesty with me, almost to a fault. It has served me well.
As I have observed the global meltdown of the financial industry I can’t help but believe that it has been forever transformed by a blatant lack of trust. When the banks stopped lending it was clear that they no longer believed one another. The Bernie Madoff case was the icing on the cake. It seems to me that it will take a long time to restore trust and confidence into the financial system. In the process, I am not sure what kind of “financial system” will actually emerge on the other side.
Snow pounding. Visibility nil.
Windshield is as far as I can see.
Treacherously slow,
Sometimes lost.
I’ve even slid off off the road a time or two.
But as the hours (and days) pass,
I slowly make progress.
As it is in snow, so it is in life.
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
— Woody Allen