Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
A man. . . needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.
Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having "a sense of self" means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why.
In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in.
We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in.
I wonder what my father saw in his most secret sight of the right life. It's my guess he wanted to live out his life surrounded by friends and children and fertile fields of his own designing. I tihnk he wanted to die believing he had been in one the creation of a good sweet place. Those old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a far away place where decent people could escape the wreckage of the old world and start over. Come to me, the dream whispers, and you can have one more chance.
I want to think I deserve what I get. I don't want to consider how vastly I am overly rewarded. I don't want to consider the injustices around me. I don't want any encounters with the disenfranchised. I want to say it's not my fault. But it is, it's yours and mine, and ours. We'd better figure out ways to spread some equity around if we want to go on living in a society that is at least semi-functional. It's a fundamental responsibility, to ourselves.
The question is, what are appropriate words and inappropriate words for network television, and what's the context? Was this appropriate in this context? Or are you creatively trying to find a way to use that word on the air?
Thinking man's crumpet? Well, it's more flattering than being a lobotomised man's crumpet, I suppose.
The real test of a man is not when he plays the role that he wants for himself but when he plays the role destiny has for him.
One of the main focuses of my training sessions is to help individuals find their unique voices in the learning process. We all have our strengths, our weaknesses, our styles of learning, our personalities. Developing introspective sensitivity to these issues is critical to long-term success.