🌀🐇 #112 not alone, unseen internet, bigger than both of us

November 16, 2022

⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

👥 You're Not Struggling Alone: If you're worried you don't have to worry. Read it here.​

❤️‍🔥 BEING SIMPLE BEAUTIFUL: Pursue Beauty, Hope, Love And Kindness. Watch it here.​

👩‍🚀 Astronaut.io: An internet oddity that shows you youtube videos with almost zero previous views. A look at the unseen internet in the age of virality. Try it here.​

🎇 Image of The Week

"These drawings are created by raking leaves. Every fall Nikola Faller, academic sculptor and land artist creates these magic images."

⌛️ First Times & Last Times

A first time is obvious. The unfamiliarity stares you in the face.

The novelty makes it crystal clear that this is something you haven't done before. Its freshness makes it salient.

Contrasted with last times, they are often ambiguous.

Sometimes we are fortunate enough for a last time to announce itself so we can fully appreciate it.

This is not always the case.

In break ups and in deaths.

The last conversation. The last laugh. The last "I love you."

Can pass us by without the in-the-moment recognition they deserve.

This is a call to deeper presence in the commonplace. The ordinary. The mundane.

Because any of these normal, everyday happenings might be secretly a last time.

Give them the attention and the reverence they deserve.

️‍ 🔮 Bigger Than Both of US

Digest these thought-provoking words from Robert Kegan:

"Thus just as the object-grasping infant is doing something which, in another form, he will try to do all his life (grasp things), so the attention-recruiting infant is doing something he will try to do all his life (recognize and be recognized)—and at bottom it is the same thing: the activity of meaning. Meaning is, in its origins, a physical activity (grasping, seeing), a social activity (it requires another), a survival activity (in doing it, we live). Meaning, understood in this way, is the primary human motion, irreducible. It cannot be divorced from the body, from social experience, or from the very survival of the organism. Meaning depends on someone who recognizes you. Not meaning, by definition, is utterly lonely. Well-fed, warm, and free of disease, you may still perish if you cannot “mean.” The reasons why we are drawn to others, especially to their welfare, are surely mysterious. But so many of the eliciting situations seem to harken back to the exigencies of this basic life motion, the activity of meaning and the threat of not meaning. We are drawn to a person in heroic struggle; we are drawn to a person vulnerably alone; we are drawn to a person who seems intensely alive; we are drawn to a person whose efforts make “perfect sense” to us. I admit to wondering if our attraction is not of some force “bigger than both of us,” a kind of species sympathy which we do not share so much as it shares us."

h/t to Jake Orthwein​

🤓 Learn This Word

Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective

⏳ From The Archives

A hand-picked classic HighExistence article.

Back in late September, I was sitting down on a hillside under some trees.

All of a sudden a little worm came into my field of vision — directly in front of my face . For a quick moment I was in total awe of this floating worm.

At first glance I believed the worm was suspended in mid-air. But I quickly realized it was dangling, attached to a thin string. A little silkworm just hanging out :)

I realized this because I had seen these worms before. I had a concept in my mind of worms that hang on string.

This made me reflect: if I did not have such a concept, if I had no idea what a silkworm is, would I realize that the worm is hanging on a string? Or would my mind never have looked for the string at all, instead staying mesmerized by this floating insect?

I imagined myself being a prehistoric human: totally captivated by the illusion. Or maybe I would have thought nothing of it. Without the knowledge that gravity exists, would I have accepted a floating worm as perfectly normal? I really can’t say…

Perception is powerful.

🎬 Endnote

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