Blood, sweat and tears

"So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I drifted into thought. Among other thoughts, I recall these. You are getting on in years, I said to myself, and are becoming an old man without being anything and without really undertaking anything. On the other hand, whenever you look in literature or in life, you see the names and figures of celebrities, the prized and highly acclaimed people, prominent or much discussed, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit humankind by making life easier and easier, some by railroads, others by omnibus and steamship, others by telegraph, others by easily understood surveys and brief publications about everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who by virtue of thought systematically make spiritual existence easier and easier and yet more and more meaningful--what are you doing?

At this point my introspection was interrupted because my cigar was finished and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought crossed my mind: you must do something, but since with your limited capacities it will be impossible to to make anything easier that it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others have, take it upon myself to make something more difficult. The idea pleased me enormously; it also flattered me that for this effort I would be loved and respected, as much as anyone else, by the entire community. In other words, when all joined together to make everything easier in every way, there remains only one possible danger, namely, the danger that the easiness would become so great that it would become all too easy. So only one lack remains, even though not yet felt, the lack of difficulty. Out of love of humankind, out of despair over my awkward predicament of having achieved nothing and of being unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, out of genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I comprehend it is my task to make difficulties everywhere. It was also especially striking to me that I might actually have my indolence to thank that this task became mine. Far from having found it, like Aladdin, by a stroke of good luck, I must assume that my indolence, by preventing me from opportunely proceeding to make things easy, has forced me into doing the only thing that remained."

--Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

I don't wanna live in the Modern World

“Philosophy is not the reading of books; philosophy is not the contemplation of nature, philosophy is not the phenomenology of personal experience; philosophy is not its history,” Wilhelmsen wrote in a striking passage. “These are indispensable tools aiding a man to come to know the things that are. But that knowing is precisely knowing and nothing else. We once were given this, not too long ago, in the American Catholic academy. With a few honorable exceptions, we are given it no longer. Philosophy ultimately exists in conversation. It needs to "talked into existence." But it first must be “thought” into existence.”

Frederick Wilhelmsen, Modern Age

What about Everything?

MANALIVE, the Glory of God is Man Fully alive, live--these are phrases we keep throwing around. But what does it mean to be fully alive. Some people believe that this means to live, life on the edge, always moving, chasing the next adrenaline rush. Yet, to be fully alive can mean the exact opposite for to be truly alive means to be contemplating the eternal. this then will influence how you see and react with the world, allow you to view it with wonder and thanks and see it with a fresh perspective. This need not require a degree in philosophy, just an orientation towards truth and a willingness to question and to ponder. Yet this is something sadly lacking in todays world, which is not prone to introspection.

Josef Pieper says In Defense of Philosophy, "People are not commonly disposed, as they are simply not in the appropriate mood, to reflect on the ultimate meaning of reality as such. As a rule, therefore, we should obviously not expect that the philosophical experience and the philosophical quest would be such a common occurrence. ‘How is it with the world as such?’—this is not a question one asks while building a house, while going to court, while taking an exam. We cannot philosophize as long as our interest remains absorbed by the active pursuit of goals, when the ‘lens’ of our soul is focused on a clearly circumscribed sector, on an objective here and now, on things that are presently ‘needed’—and explicitly on anything else. (In intelligent company one can, of course, readily and always discuss any philosophical ‘problem’ tossed to it from the outside like a question on a quiz show. This is not what I am talking about. Here, I understand the philosophical quest as an existential experienced centered in the core of the human mind, a spontaneous, urgent, inescapable stirring of a person’s innermost life.) More likely than not, therefore, a challenge is required that shakes the common and ‘normal’ attitude dominating—by nature and by right—man’s everyday life; a push is needed, a shock, in order to trigger the question that reaches beyond the sphere of mere material needs, the question as to the meaning of the world and of existence: to trigger the philosophical process.”