“Teach us to care and not to care,” says T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday. Let the reader of the following newsletter beware: it is written by someone who has very imperfectly managed to follow that wise admonition. I have always been much better at caring than not caring, at being involved rather than detached. My natural impulse is to jump in, not only without checking for water in the pool but sometimes not even making sure there is a pool. I have written an entire book based on the idea of reality as a creative tension of what Blake called Contraries, but Jung is quite right that no merely human being manages the godlike feat of uniting the opposites. To be human is to be one-sided. Human development is to make the same mistake over and over, but each time learning and growing from it. The best I can say is that I have tried to learn over the years about the tendency to care too much, or to care in the wrong way.
March 10, 2023
March 10, 2023
March 10, 2023
“Teach us to care and not to care,” says T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday. Let the reader of the following newsletter beware: it is written by someone who has very imperfectly managed to follow that wise admonition. I have always been much better at caring than not caring, at being involved rather than detached. My natural impulse is to jump in, not only without checking for water in the pool but sometimes not even making sure there is a pool. I have written an entire book based on the idea of reality as a creative tension of what Blake called Contraries, but Jung is quite right that no merely human being manages the godlike feat of uniting the opposites. To be human is to be one-sided. Human development is to make the same mistake over and over, but each time learning and growing from it. The best I can say is that I have tried to learn over the years about the tendency to care too much, or to care in the wrong way.