New Year 2024– Ideas For A Life Worth Living – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #894

New Year –Ideas For A Life Worth Living – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #894

Dear Colleagues!  This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #894 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans  aims to share knowledge and wisdom from Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on  WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here.

Credit: Anna Tarazevich

Credit: Sami Anas

Welcome New Year – 2024. Let Us Pray that the New Year Brings Peace, Comfort, Calm, Opportunities, Justice, Fair play, Fulfilment, and Makes Life Worth Living for Us. Aameen. 

I have been a longtime admirer of Maria Popova who fled from Hungary (I guess) and came to the US at a very young age. She is deep into many literary pursuits and has been publishing a Newsletter which was previously named ‘Brainpickings’ and now renamed as ‘The Marginalian’. She does enormous amount of work to keep this newsletter and other projects going. Reading ‘The Marginalian’ twice a week brings a breath of fresh air in the otherwise stale routine of work and life. (Link at the end. I recommend subscribing to her newsletter)

In her December 27, 2023, post, she quoted ideas from several literary stalwarts for making life worth living. I am quoting from her and hope you will share our enthusiasm and good feeling about these. 

Hannah Arendt (October 1906 – December 1975) became America’s preeminent philosopher after arriving as a refugee from Nazi Germany. Following quote is from her soulful work, “Love and Saint Augustine’.

“In their fear of death, those living, fear life itself, a life that is doomed to die… The mode in which life knows and perceives itself is worry. Thus the object of fear comes to be fear itself. Even if we should assume that there is nothing to fear, that death is no evil, the fact of fear (that all living things shun death) remains.

Fearlessness is what love seeks. Love as craving is determined by its goal, and this goal is freedom from fear… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now”.

Toni Morrison (February 1931 – August 2019), was the first black, female writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her 1987 masterpiece ‘Beloved”, she writes:

“Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face… Love your mouth… This is flesh… Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms… Love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver — love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air … love your heart. For this is the prize”.

Victor Frankl (March 1905 – September 1997), narrowly escaped death in a concentration camp, and later delivered a set of extraordinary lectures on moving beyond optimism and pessimism to find the deepest source of meaning. 

“It is not only through our actions that we can give life meaning — insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly — we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the beautiful, the great, the good … imagine that you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favorite symphony, and your favorite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine; and now imagine that it would be possible (something that is psychologically so impossible) for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would agree with me if I declared that in this case you would only be able to give one answer, and it would go something like: “It would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!”

“Those who experience, not the arts, but nature, may have a similar response, and also those, who experience another human being. Do we not know the feeling that overtakes us when we are in the presence of a particular person and, roughly translates as, The fact that this person exists in the world at all, this alone makes this world, and a life in it, meaningful.”

Leo Tolstoy (September 1828 – November 1910), the great Russian writer, began reckoning with his own imperfect life, punctuated by the human inevitability of having acted unwisely and unlovingly in moments, and thus began his “Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul’ – a compendium of quotations by great thinkers of the past, annotated with Tolstoy’s own thoughts.

“The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.

Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.

You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.

Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.

Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”

James Baldwin (August 1924 – December 1987), the great, black, American thinker and writer said that we only see as much kindness as we ourselves possess. We are untender with each other because we cannot bear the terrifying difficulty of being human, vulnerable, and perishable as we are.

“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.

The earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light shines, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope”.

Rachel Carson (May 1907 – April 1964), Marine Biologist and poetic nature writer, whose 1962 book ‘Silent Spring’ catalyzed the environment movement, became the most revered science writer.

“You are wise enough to understand that being “a little lonely” is not a bad thing. A writer’s occupation is one of the loneliest in the world, even if the loneliness is only an inner solitude and isolation, for that he must have at times if he is to be truly creative. And so I believe only the person who knows and is not afraid of loneliness should aspire to be a writer. But there are also rewards that are rich and peculiarly satisfying”.

Ursula K. Le Guin (October 1929 – January 2018), American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction set in her Hainish universe, wrote about communication.

“In most cases of people actually talking to one another, human communication cannot be reduced to information. The message not only involves, it is, a relationship between speaker and hearer. The medium in which the message is embedded is immensely complex, infinitely more than a code: it is a language, a function of a society, a culture, in which the language, the speaker, and the hearer are all embedded.

Speech connects us so immediately and vitally because it is a physical, bodily process, to begin with. Not a mental or spiritual one, wherever it may end… The voice creates a sphere around it, which includes all its hearers: an intimate sphere or area, limited in both space and time.

Creation is an act. Action takes energy.

Sound is dynamic. Speech is dynamic — it is action. To act is to take power, to have power, to be powerful. Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners. The strength of a community is amplified, augmented by its mutual entrainment in speech”.

Seneca (c.4 BC – AD 65), the great Roman philosopher, defined the concept of anxiety two thousand years before the clinical concept of anxiety.

“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.

Accordingly, some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow”.

Bertrand Russell (May 1872–February 1970), great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate, looked back on his eight decades of life — not yet knowing that he would live for nearly two more — to examine what makes it worth living.

“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being”.

Maria Popova recommends – Choose the Eyes of Love. 

“What we see is never raw reality, pure as spacetime — what we see is our interpretation of reality, filtered through the lens of our experience and our conditioned worldview. 

It is a service to reality to see with greater charity of interpretation. It is a service to other human beings to look at them, confused and self-concerned as they may be, with the eyes of love and to resist for as long as possible letting the cataract of judgment occlude our view.

To place the wish to understand above the wish to be right — and to see, with Thich Nhat Hanh, that “understanding is love’s other name” — that is the greatest gift we can give one another".

Let us Welcome New Year – 2024, with the Resolution to Make Life Worth Living for Us and Them.

Concluded.

Reference:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/01/01/resolutions-for-living/?mc_cid=630fec02d1&mc_eid=888bb361a0