[Image: Untitled photograph by Diana Eftaiha, via Flickr. Used under a
Creative Commons license.]
From whiskey river:
Going nowhere, as Leonard Cohen would later emphasize for me, isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.
The idea behind Nowhere — choosing to sit still long enough to turn inward — is at heart a simple one. If your car is broken, you don’t try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems — and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind — lie within. To hurry around trying to find happiness outside ourselves makes about as much sense as the comical figure in the Sufi parable who, having lost a key in his living room, goes out into the street to look for it because there’s more light there. As Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius reminded us more than two millennia ago, it’s not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them; a hurricane sweeps through town, reducing everything to rubble, and one man sees it as a liberation, a chance to start anew, while another, perhaps even his brother, is traumatized for life. “There is nothing either good or bad,” as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.”
So much of our lives takes place in our heads — in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation — that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it. As America’s wisest psychologist, William James, reminded us, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” It’s the perspective we choose — not the places we visit — that ultimately tells us where we stand.
(Pico Iyer [source])
…and:
Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings
for Charles Fishman
Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacket
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise,
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isn’t exactly business that pulls your spirit into
the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossip — the mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.
(Juan Felipe Herrera [source])
…and:
Perhaps I don’t know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don’t know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways—everything, ideas included… It’s only if I look at them directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it… No, I wasn’t wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I—I don’t mean it literally—it’s not that things are alive… it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There’s something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can’t measure out with thoughts, a sort of life that can’t be expressed in words and which is my life, all the same.
(Robert Musil [source (PDF)])
