Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms―this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men."

Anyway

From a sign on the wall of Shishu Bhavan, the children's home in Calcutta:

ANYWAY

People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered,

LOVE THEM ANYWAY

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives,

DO GOOD ANYWAY

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies,

SUCCEED ANYWAY

The good you do will be forgotten tomorrow,

DO GOOD ANYWAY

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable,

BE HONEST AND FRANK ANYWAY

What you spent years building may be destroyed overnight,

BUILD ANYWAY

People really need help but may attack you if you help them,

HELP PEOPLE ANYWAY

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth,

GIVE THE WORLD THE BEST YOU'VE GOT ANYWAY.

A Simple Faith

I finished this book yesterday, and Jodi―mostly just making conversation―asked me if I had learned anything from it.

Hmmm...

I didn't learn anything earth-shattering, nothing that I wasn't aware of on some level. In fact, I approach anything I don't believe or understand with a measure of skepticism, and I probably always will.

However, I was inspired by what I read.

(Note: I can completely disagree with your theology, but work side-by-side with you in any good work. I wasn't always that way.)

Some excerpts, which are all quotes from Missionaries of Charity volunteers:

p. 95
"In the West we have a tendency to be profit-oriented, where everything is measured according to the results and we get caught up in being more and more active to generate results. In the East―especially in India―I find that people are more content to just be, to just sit around under a banyan tree for half a day chatting to each other. We Westerners would probably call that wasting time. But there is value to it. Being with someone, listening without a clock and without anticipation of results, teaches us about love."

pp. 145-146
"For the first couple of days I was completely ecstatic―I thought, 'I'm so wonderful, I'm doing all these wonderful things looking after these children, I'm giving them loads of love and they just smile at me and love me.' I felt so brilliant and so holy! And then, after three days, I had a complete breakdown because I suddenly realized that I was a terrible person to be going there for only a short while. I was playing with these children, cuddling them, giving them lots of attention―and at the end of my time there I was coming back to my nice cozy little place in England, my nice cushy job, and my weekly wage. I was giving sweets to a baby and then taking them away again. I started to cry, I had felt so good, such a good person, and now I realized that I wasn't, because I was volunteering for me, not them. I was giving because of something in me that needed healing, and that was the need I had for love.

"A volunteer who had been there much longer than I comforted me and said, 'Whatever love you give, however small, they wouldn't have had if you hadn't come, or given it. Each volunteer who will come after you will give them a little more.'"

p. 152-153
"I'd do two nights a week at a shelter for women who were mostly drug addicts, alcoholics, ex-prostitutes, and people just out of prison. It was a dangerous place but I learned a lot about the homeless. You know, we tend to see them as visitors from another planet. We never think of hunkering down and talking to them, because we think they might be violent or mentally unbalanced; but from my experience those are usually in the minority. Most of them are quiet, gentle people where something has just gone wrong. They are vulnerable and more endangered than dangerous."

"Every morning I am delighted to be here. I think, Thank God, and let's get started. I'm always happy to start the day, unlike the way I felt at other jobs I had―secular, paying jobs―where I would always be discontented. Here what I am doing is compatible with what I'm thinking inside. There's no conflict between feeling and thinking and doing."

p. 156
"We've certainly learned a great deal from helping the sisters with their work. One of these lessons is that you become less vulnerable when you concern yourself with other people's vulnerability rather than your own. We've found that when we're fully involved with helping others, all around the place, we haven't really got time to worry about our own fears―and so they fall into perspective."

p. 157
"When you got to know the characters, I found you looked past the labels we use like 'alcoholic', or 'drug addict'―you saw the people and they became friends."

p. 174
"I've found that working here puts the things in my life in perspective, in balance. When I'm in the office I'm in the so-called real world, but then when I started volunteering with the Missionaries of Charity one day a week, I realized that this was the real world, not the other. The home isn't a glamorous or beautiful place but the people here are real live human beings who are being born again because they're dying. The people downtown are alive but the're not really living at all."

Nuggets from "Defining the Wind"

pp. 145 - 146

"Nature, rightly questioned, never lies." That quotation entirely sums up a book, an era, a world, a way of living.

One hundred fifty years before [1859], people thought there were questions that simply could not be answered. Defoe, in The Storm [1704], had said people could simply never know why the wind blew -- in fact, too much questioning would finally throw Mother Nature herself into a rage: The answer "is not in Me, you must go Home and ask my Father." Now, whether it's nuclear weaponry, cloning, or the Human Genome Project, we often wonder whether we are learning things we should not know.

No such uncertainty then -- at that moment, Beaufort and the phalanx of freshly minted "scientists" knew: "Nature, rightly questioned, never lies." They feared knowing neither too little nor too much; it was all a matter of finding the questions, and the rest would come almost as obligation. They believed that if you were patient, thorough, and careful, you could eventually figure out everything.

pp. 176 - 177

A dictionary thus becomes a document, a living history, a portal into the world it means to describe. The Merriam-Webster 1934 Second New International, for example, includes color plates of the house flags of the major steamship lines -- it's a detail, a clue about what was important in 1934. I once bought an atlas printed in 1933 only because in every map showing the North Atlantic it included transatlantic cable lines; in maps of Europe it showed the tangle of cables running all over the North Sea and the Mediterranean. That's what was important then, and it's sweet to remember it now, when it would no more cross the mind of an atlas publisher to include uncountable transatlantic cables than it would to include mail routes. The atlas, a reference book, itself becomes an artifact instead of merely a guide to others.

Books

I've always enjoyed reading...a lot. Mostly I read for the pure joy of understanding things.

In grade school I was fascinated by science books. In junior high (middle) school I read every math puzzle book that I could get my hands on. Over the past several years I have read quite a few histories and biographies. (See http://www.librarything.com/home/harleman)

It was only a little over a year ago that I grasped the concept that my view of the universe -- my paradigm -- is totally unique. No other person sees the world exactly as I do. (Nor can they; nor should they want to.) A book helped me to finally understand that.

I have always been curious about how humans came to have the body of knowledge that we have, and about what life was like before we knew what we now take for granted. The vast majority of all humans who have ever lived spent all their evenings doing something besides watching TV or playing with a computer (or a smart phone). From sundown until sleep, everything was done by firelight, moonlight, or in darkness. Almost certainly, nearly everyone knew the night sky as well as they knew their own back yard. Books are helping me to understand what life was like for most of human history.

Here is a list of the most important books that I have read in the past year (in the approximate order that I have read them). Each one has had a tremendous influence on the way that I view the world and/or myself:

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People © 1989 by Stephen R. Covey
• A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 © 2005 by Simon Winchester
• Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation © 1999 by Parker J. Palmer
• The Road Less Traveled © 1978 by M. Scott Peck, M.D.
• Defining the Wind © 2004 by Scott Huler

I've just started reading Defining the Wind. (I'm on page 43 of 281.) Its purpose is to explain how the Beaufort Scale was developed.

I don't recall how I came to have this book, or why I would have even chosen it in the first place. But it's a very enjoyable and captivating read. (Sometimes as much fun as Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story.)

Defining the Wind has already helped me to get a better grasp of how our understanding of the world has changed in 200 years. It has also piqued my growing suspicion that maybe -- just maybe -- there really aren't so many "coincidences" in life.

It's a Small World (After All!)

Sometimes life sure seems to have a lot of funny twists and turns.

About 4 years ago I drove through Peru, Indiana -- where I had lived from 1964 - 1970 (4th through 9th grades) -- and decided that I was quite happy that I didn't live there any more.

About 2 1/2 years ago my wife and I moved into an RV with the idea that we'd do what a lot of people dream of doing (usually after retirement), but most never accomplish: Travel and spend time together. (During our first 8 years of marriage, we had been practically joined at the hip...and I wouldn't trade that time together for anything.)

After a year and a half of travel, we discovered that we weren't the close, happy couple that we had been decades before, and she discovered that she didn't really want to live without roots. She went back to a stationary life, and I stayed in the RV.

A few months ago I pulled the house to Peru to visit someone I had known for 3 years, in 7th through 9th grades. We hadn't had any contact whatsoever in the 40 years from 1970 -- when my family moved to Seymour, Indiana -- until this year. I planned on staying in Peru for a week or two, then heading to Indianapolis for the Eagle Creek Folk Festival, where my brother would be performing. After that, I intended to be back in North Carolina (and Virginia) for MusicFest 'n Sugar Grove, FloydFest, FiddleFest, and the Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance.

While in Peru, I (re)discovered that I didn't like the area any better than I thought I would. Among other things, Indiana summers are more oppressive than those in North Carolina, and Indiana winters are brutal.

But, getting to know the junior high classmate has been awesome, I've re-connected with several old friends, and made some very good new friends as well.

I've enjoyed music at the Honeywell Center in Wabash, Peru's Circus City Festival, Denver Days in Denver, Indiana (the web site is stuck on 1996, but the festival still happens every year), the Northern Indiana Bluegrass Association's festival in Kendallville, Indiana, the Roann Covered Bridge Festival, and open house at Doud's Orchard in Denver, Indiana.

I'm in one of the last places on earth that I would have chosen to live, but I'm more comfortable with life in general than I have ever been before.

So...in the next week or so I'll be moving out of the RV and into an apartment in Peru. I'm actually kinda nervous about whether or not I'm ready for my first Indiana winter in 16 years.

Come spring, maybe I'll head back to North Carolina. (At least for a visit. My daughters and grandkids are there.) I'd like to attend some of the North Carolina and Virginia music festivals that I missed this year...but, as much as I miss the festivals, they aren't as important as they were a few months ago. I might actually put roots in Peru, Indiana. (OMG!)

Life sure can be exciting!

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

"Adam's first night on earth? When he lays down to sleep? He thinks it's all over, right? He doesn't know what sleep is. His eyes are closing and the thinks he's leaving this world, right? Only he isn't. He wakes up the next morning and he has a fresh new world to work with, but he has something else, too. He has yesterday."

"Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to."

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

Before he can devote himself to God or to a woman, a boy will devote himself to his father, even foolishly, even beyond explanation.

"You have peace," the old woman said, "when you make it with yourself."

"He was a spender, a risk taker -- he went over the boards when he got an idea."

Even his happy moments feel encased, like holes jabbed in a hard sheet of ice.

He never speaks about the darkness to Marguerite. She strokes his hair and says, "What's wrong?" and he says, "Nothing, I'm just beat," and leaves it at that. How can he explain such sadness when she is supposed to make him happy? The truth is he cannot explain it himself. All he knows is that something stepped in front of him, blocking his way, until in time he gave up on things... He sat down in his life. And there he remained.

Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them.

"Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves."

People say they "find" love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and woman. What people find then is a certain love. And Eddie found a certain love with Marguerite, a grateful love, a deep but quiet love, one that he knew, above all else, was irreplaceable. Once she'd gone, [he had] let the days go stale.

"I ain't talked this much since I got here," he said. She nodded and smiled, a gentle smile, and at the sight of it, his eyes began to moisten and a wave of sadness washed over him...

...her eyebrows lifted and her lips spread and Eddie felt an old, warm feeling he had missed for years, the simple act of making his wife happy.

"Sounds strange, don't it?" Eddie said. "It sounds," she said, wistfully, "like someone else's summer." Eddie realized that was precisely what he'd been feeling for years.

"Love is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. Life has to end," she said. "Love doesn't."

"I was still in love with you." "I know." She nodded. "I felt it." "Here?" he asked. "Even here," she said, smiling. "That's how strong lost love can be."

She held out her arms. And for the first time in heaven, he initiated his contact, he came to her, ignoring the leg, ignoring all the ugly associations he had made about dance and music and weddings, realizing now that they were really about loneliness.

It is never hard to act ordinary if you feel ordinary, and the paleness of surrender becomes the color of Eddie's days.

He leans on the cane and he looks at the headstone and he thinks about many things. Taffy. He thinks about taffy. He thinks it would take his teeth out now, but he would eat it anyhow, if it meant eating it with her.