Posts tagged "life":

Diary

I am in the US for the last ten days. I came over because my brother was in hospital. He drove himself there just in time, in the middle of a heart attack; collapsing on the hospital floor. They gave him CPR and snapped him back, and, in the following days performed catheterization and angioplasty. However, he suffered another three cardiac arrests afterwards at the hospital, where he also needed CPR. I arrived just before they installed a device called an Implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), which is considered necessary in order resolve a problem known as arrhthmia, where the heart is not able to maintain its normal rhythms.

Saving our sources of inspiration

Spirituality is an important human impetus. It provides meaning to our lives and helps us to see beyond the horizon of our known world. Without it, existence would be flat and two-dimensional. With spirituality, we regain a sense of wonder at a universe that seems to transcend our finite understanding and diminished view.

June 27, 2020

Finishing up my time here in the US. I think I will miss the quietude of being at home alone, and will not enjoy the bustle of being in a full household again. Coronavirus cases are sky-rocketing in Israel again, so I won't want to go out even after the period of home-isolation. I think I just want to live the rest of my life in quiet places; Neve Shalom or Auroville. There isn't much on offer outside of solitude. It's true that I need to keep my body more active, so that it doesn't grow weak and inflexible, but there are solutions for that.

June 24, 2020

I was reading in the Guardian a story about failed art restorations; a statue of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, in which the infant was restored to a kind of monkey; a similar painting of Christ in which he comes out looking like a plump gremlin; and finally a tower in Istanbul that, according to social media, resembles a giant Sponge Bob. I actually don't know about the character of Sponge Bob, but this had me doubling over in laughter anyway.

June 23, 2020

What I have to admit, from the beginning, is that I know nothing, and yet I know too much. I know nothing, on the basis that I’m poorly read. I have read little of the great western philosophers. But also because the state of our knowledge, in the first quarter of the 21st century, is also very poor, compared to what it will be fifty or a hundred years later. On the basis of what we knew, in the 20th century, we have committed terrible errors and vicious crimes against humanity. On the basis of what we currently know, it is clear that we are destroying our biosphere.

Looking through my father's photo albums

There's something inexpressibly sad about looking through these old albums. My father, as he grew older, no longer looked at them. Most of the people there were already dead - he had simply outlived them all. And now I have outlived my father. But that is not the reason I find it sad. It's more because seeing these images, many of them representing “peak" moments in life like weddings, vacations, and time spent with children, can make the whole of life seem pointless. It's true, of course, that the memories thus enshrined, the majority of them, were not my own. But recently Dorit sent photos of me with my children and I felt something similar. It was as if the persons there - my children and me - were of someone else. I hardly recognized them. Who was that person?

Foreign workers

“Foreign workers are particularly vulnerable, with a weaker support network and language barriers that prevent them from seeking government help…”