Brain Food #806: Seeing the beauty and necessity in things
Burning ourselves in our own flame
Thoughts of the day
As we join another journey of the Earth orbiting the Sun, it is tempting to enter the mindset of starting again. And so, we start creating a list of things we would like to do or be, in a future that remains unpredictable.
On New Year’s Day, 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche was writing The Gay Science, and made a different type of resolution:
“For the New Year. I still live, I still think; I must still live, for I must still think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everyone takes the liberty of expressing his wish and his favourite thought: well, I also mean to tell what I have wished for myself today, and what thought first crossed my mind this year, a thought which ought to be the basis, the pledge and the sweetening of all my future life! I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful: I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!”
Nietzsche’s wish for himself is one we can borrow: to see the beauty but also the necessity in things, and to remain honest with and unaffected by the ugliness we encounter. Events will happen. But our attitude to life determines much of how what happens to us has the power to change us, and how it changes us; whether it makes us harder and more withdrawn, or active participants, who dare to see the beautiful, and to point it out to others.
Aun Aprendo by Francisco Goya was drawn towards the end of the life of the Spanish artist. The text means, ‘I am still learning,’ but it also means one is never old enough to be open to lessons, and to go through life with humility, and an openness to change. As Nietzsche also wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?”
To be is to bear witness to life, but to also remember that it is up to us to instigate some of the change we desire to see, especially if that change is internal.
I wish you a happy 2023, filled with prosperity, peace, and patience.
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