🛋️ The Weekend Review
The weekend review captures a few highlights from the week’s meditations, prompts, and practices. Each installment includes an insight from a meditation, podcast, and book I’m reading! It’s intended to provide an opportunity to revisit, review, and reflect on the art of living.
📌 Embracing Interdependence
At this week’s Reading & the Good Life meetup, we discussed the following passage from Why Cicero Matters by Vittorio Bufacchi.
The reference to interdependence is crucial and illuminating. Interdependence is not a sign of weakness or ineptitude, but a reminder that human beings are social beings, or as Cicero said: ‘The primary reason for the public coming together is not so much weakness as a sort of innate desire on the part of human beings to form communities.’ To embrace interdependence is to recognize that social cooperation is not a choice but a natural necessity, and politics is the art of pooling resources and working as a team in order to maximize the benefits of social cooperation, while finding a just and equitable distribution for its costs. […]
Read more: Why Cicero Matters (Pt. 3)
📜 Imaginary Suffering
This week, in the Dying Every Day series, we discussed the importance of finding reasons not to worry.
Read more: Reasons Not to Worry
📮 The Value of Time
The Letters to a Young Seeker series reflected on a well-known passage from the American writer Annie Dillard:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. […]
Read more: How we spend our days…
🔖 What I’m Reading
“If this book succeeds even a little, it will open up a crack in your sense of self—a chink in the armor of your certainties, of your confidence in the basic assumptions we all make about life—that will allow a revelation to begin to unfold in your life, as well as in the lives of those around you, and ultimately, perhaps, in the whole human family, and through it, in the great family of all animate beings.” — Original Love by Henry Shukman
—
Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W. Bertolotti
P.S. If you’re interested in becoming a member but cannot afford it, feel free to request a complimentary membership or use this discount link.