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David Aaron, The Secret Life of God
I have heard it said that when you share your sadness with another person it is halved, and when you share your joy it is doubled. This is all the more so when you realize that God shares in your sadness and joys.
God shares in your sadness and joys
Simone Weil, The Gentle Smile
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, what are you going through?
Love wants to know what you are going through
William Wordsworth, Full Esteem Ahead
The best portion of a good man's life — his little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
The best portion of a good man's life
Madonna Kolbenschlag, Eastward Toward Eve
The price of unity is sharing: the disciples on the way to Emmaus do not recognize their fellow traveler until they break bread with him. In the ancient Passover paradigm, we must recognize and know the other as no-stranger; then come the unity and sharing. In the New Testament Passover, we must first love, even a stranger, and share our substance in order to achieve recognition and unity.
The Price of Unity is Sharing
Daphne Rose Kingma, The Book of Love
In sharing your body with the person you love, you are sharing your true essence. So honor that essence, the highest human expression of your embodied soul, by nourishing, loving, and cherishing your body — for yourself and for your beloved.
You are sharing your true essence
Joan Chittister, In Search of Belief
The miracle is not that Jesus multiplied bread and fish, who knows how — by shaming the affluent into sharing their own or by inspiring people to control their greedy appetites or by contravening for an electric moment the laws of nature? The real miracle is that somehow or other the limited resources in that place were shared and came to make do when none of the apostles there believed they would.
The miracle is not that Jesus multiplied bread and fish
The Prayer of Saint Francis
An Excerpt from The Prayer of Saint Francis: A Message of Peace for the World Today by Leonardo Boff
Leonardo Boff, a Catholic theologian in Brazil, meditates upon the prayer of Saint Francis and finds within its verses a cornucopia of spiritual insights and practices. Here is an excerpt on love.
"The economy of spiritual goods is different from the economy of material goods. The more you give away material goods — money, land, houses, clothing, and food — the less you have. You become poorer and poorer until you end up in want. When very rich people spend lavishly and wastefully, they come to a miserable end.
"The economy of spiritual goods is quite the reverse. The more we give, the more we receive; the more we surrender, the more we have. The more we love, show solidarity, spread good will, and practice forgiveness, the more we gain as human persons and the greater the esteem we receive. Spiritual goods are like love: they multiply by dividing; like fire, they increase by spreading."
Leonardo Boff on giving and sharing our spiritual goods.
Super Cooperators
"Many of my own collaborations are with people who live on other continents. But because of email, Skype, phone, and so on, it is as if they are sitting in the room next door. My room in the woods of New England is as close to Cambridge as to Roger's home in London or to Hisashi's office in Tokyo. In this way, productive ideas and innovations can spread far and wide. Today, there are innumerable ways by which cooperation can flourish.
"But with new opportunities come new dangers. All my work on the evolution of cooperation hints at one inevitable feature: there is no such thing as utopia and the degree of cooperation in a society will fall as inevitably as it will rise again. With globalization, the planet's resources are becoming exhausted. With globalization, the never-ending competitive quest to achieve economic growth is unsustainable. With globalization comes uniformity too, which makes us more vulnerable to jolts. As has been seen in the financial world, there is no longer safety in investing in diversified American, European, and Asian stocks. They are all interconnected, and when a financial collapse hits one market, they can all plunge into a nosedive. For the same reason, we are more vulnerable to pandemics: thanks to international air travel, a disease can quickly become established and spread around the world.
"We cannot expect cooperation to endure forever. But we can hope to prevent a drastic fall, or at least ensure that cooperation is more likely to prevail over longer periods of time and only suffer the occasional breakdown. We can work to quickly reestablish cooperation after each collapse.
"We need to place more faith in citizens than leaders. Cooperation has to come from the bottom up and not be imposed from the top down. That is why, for example, democracy is a cornerstone concept, since this is a form of cooperation that grows from the roots. We need to do even more to create an environment where cooperation can flourish, if we are to reap its creative benefits.
"Another lesson of my analysis of the mechanisms of cooperation over the years is that we have to learn not to be too inward looking, petty minded, and competitive. When it comes to the structure of society, for example, we have to step out of the narrow confinement of looking after our relatives, or our own kind. Kin selection (even if properly formulated) is only a small component of human cooperation. Nepotism is counterproductive when it comes to cultivating cooperation across wider swaths of society.
"We have to look beyond the narrow idea that punishment and threat can enforce cooperation. In my opinion, creative cooperation can only come from helpful interactions such as participation, friendship, and reward.
"We also discovered how we need to be more open to absorbing the lessons that lie behind the success of other people, rather than focus on our own immediate goals. By adopting the former extrovert strategy, rather than the introvert latter, we can ensure that best practice will become established."
Martin Nowak on why cooperation needs to come from the bottom up.
Walking the Way
"You and I are not opposed to one another. Life is not necessarily a zero-sum game where if you have more, I'll have less. This is a fiction based on a narrow vision that pits self and others against one another. In reality, we are all in this together.
"When there is enough to share, there is no problem. When there is not enough to share, if everyone goes out foraging there will be more. Even when you are on a seesaw and it looks like one is up and the other is down, each relies on the other in a balancing relationship and the individual positions are merely temporary.
"Capitalism glorifies competition, but being yourself is no contest. You are unique. Problems only arise when we compare our relative worth to others'. If you think of some people as being good, there is nobody who does not have some goodness about them. If you think of some people as being bad, there is nobody that does not have some badness.
"As soon as you start making comparisons you open a door for self-doubt: where do you belong on the measurement scale? We are used to worrying about whether we're 'normal,' but normality did not even exist until people gathered in urban centers and statisticians began to tabulate how they were distributed. Once the normal curve was constructed, people were placed relative to the mean.
"It's not possible to have a normal curve where all the children are 'above average,' some must be below for others to be above. So instead of each student simply being who she is, grades are assigned. When society tries to put people in their 'proper' place, everyone struggles with their position on the totem pole.
"Life is not fundamentally something to contend with but something to explore and appreciate. You appreciate it by contributing to it as yourself. Your self is not a measured thing but a streaming flow of relationships with people, with living beings, and with the material world that surrounds you and holds you.
"Dwell with earth; think with depth; help with kindness. It's easy to be sincere when you stop pretending to be anything other than who you are. There's no place for blame when your skill consists of simply being yourself, a word spoken in time, flowing still."
Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum on dwelling with earth and thinking with depth.
Information Anxiety
"There is only one method for transmitting thought, for communicating information in a manner that somewhat captures the spirit of the mind: the medium of the conversation. Conversation can be a mirror of the mind, a petri dish for ideas. It enables us to communicate our thoughts in a manner that most closely models the way they occur in our minds.
"Unlike writing, conversations are not bound by principles of logic, transition, and clarity. The spontaneity of conversations prevents them from being edited to a sterile purity. The lapses, nonsequiturs, and quirky associations that characterize the best conversations would be unacceptable in written material. Nor are we as likely in conversations to succumb to scholarly posturing, although every once in a while we encounter a stubborn pedant who has managed to accomplish this.
"The implicit and explicit goal of all conversations is understanding. Whether they occur between lovers, friends, relatives, or business associates, conversations have as their express goal to get one's point across, to make a connection between one's thoughts and another person, i.e. the outside world; they are an understanding model, a forum for the exchange of information.
"Within conversations are a myriad of self-adjusting systems. As we speak with another person, we constantly readjust our language based on the cues we get from the listener. Do they look baffled or excited, bored or angry?
"Unlike almost all machinery, conversations can tune themselves. We make adjustments, simplify, repeat, and move between various levels of complexity based on continuous feedback — a quarter-inch nod of a chin, the lowering or raising of eyes, strange guttural noises that say 'uh-huh, uh-huh,' blinks, shrugs, turns of the head, loss of eye contact, the making of eye contact. A symphony of signals occurs during even the briefest of conversations.
"There is nothing we do better than when we do conversation well.
"There is no other communication device that provides such subtle and instantaneous feedback, or permits such a range of evaluation and correctability.
Words are strung together seemingly without hesitation in phenomenally complex sequences and thoughts. Words work with each other to form new meaning. By their existence conversation allows for the development of new ideas. Ideas are created in conversation. E. M. Forster said that 'speak before you think is creation's motto.' Although spoken language is learned, it becomes natural and seemingly becomes instinctive. It is our pipeline to understanding. We have more skills to put thoughts together by language than we do by pictures.
Talk is Deep
"There are so few things we do in our life in which the absolute goal is to make things understandable. We have conversations all around us, yet we neither appreciate them as channels for the transmission of information, nor do we exploit their positive principles in other endeavors. No one seems to trust them. The favorite end to most business conversations is 'Why don't you put that in writing?'
"While the informality and amorphous structure of conversation cannot replace the written word, nor should it, it could be used much more as a model for the exchange of information.
Social exchanges. Conversations play an increasingly insignificant role in our lives, contributing to feelings of alienation and isolation from society. Everyone has the opportunity to use conversation as a model for communication. While this seems absurdly simple, and most people would reply that they do this every day, what we are really doing most of the time is lecturing. Conversation in its purest form means listening, responding to new stimuli, exchanging ideas. It requires thought, attention, and a patience of which few of us have enough."
Richard Saul Wurman on how conversation with others demands thought, intention, and attention.