Live.

"And there are so many reasons to live! As a sentient being, you have the potential to flourish. You can refine your faculty of reason itself by learning and debating. You can seek explanations of the natural world through science, and insight into the human condition through the arts and humanities. You can make the most of your capacity for pleasure and satisfaction, which allowed your ancestors to thrive and thereby allowed you to exist. You can appreciate the beauty and richness of the natural and cultural world. As the heir to billions of years of life perpetuating itself, you can perpetuate life in turn. You have been endowed with a sense of sympathy—the ability to like, love, respect, help, and show kindness—and you can enjoy the gift of mutual benevolence with friends, family, and colleagues. And because reason tells you that none of this is particular to you, you have the responsibility to provide to others what you expect for yourself. You can foster the welfare of other sentient beings by enhancing life, health, knowledge, freedom, abundance, safety, beauty, and peace. History shows that when we sympathize with others and apply our ingenuity to improving the human condition, we can make progress in doing so, and you can help to continue that progress."


Steven Pinker - Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now

Photo: Dejan

New learning and engagement.

"(...) we tend to feel awfully guilty about it, supposing that our time in front of our devices should be “constructive” and “productive” when it is, in reality, both productive and aimless. Since our lives have pretty much moved to the screen, we can expect our time on the Internet to be as varied as life itself. It’s a mistake to describe our online experience as monolithic: sometimes we need to work and other times we need to drift, to waste time, to fuck off. Learning and engagement continues as before, but it takes new and different forms. I think it’s time to drop the guilt about wasting time on the Internet, and move on. Surely we’re more complex than that."

Kenneth Goldsmith, Why I am Teaching A Course Called “Wasting Time on the Internet“

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wasting-time-on-the-internet

Photo: Dejan

Books to recommend.

"It is really hard to say which books one should recommend. The best is if they are somehow intriguing, kind of not the obvious choices. Books that open a new way of thinking, a new culture, present a person´s world that one is not so familiar with."
Pekka Metso

http://metinalista.si/i-like-the-books-tell-a-good-story-that-stays-in-my-head-pekka-metso/

Photo: Dejan

Human imperfection neglects serious/precise approach?

"So don't brood over everything in that super-serious way of yours. All of us (by which I mean all of us, both normal and not-so-normal) are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. We don't live with the mechanical precision of a bank account or by measuring all our lines and angles with rulers and protractors. Am I right?"

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Photo: Dejan

Give a way to hand it to you.

"If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you."

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Photo: Dejan - flower giving bees a way