Life is Too Short

As a person of faith, I am compelled to see life through eyes that have presuppositions of life and death which have a meaning so very different than people in the culture around me.  A colleague recently encouraged me to feed my awareness of the brevity of life.

Those words have meant much to me this year.  I am in the middle of the memoirs of a brilliant yet tragically misguided journalist of our generation – Christopher Hitchens (picture; died Dec 15, 2011).  He was an atheist, a humanist and a socialist. Last year I read his book God is Not Great and have watched an intriguing video of him debating a scholar. I enjoy how Hitchens keeps me learning – keeps me going to the dictionary even as he’s from political positions I disagree with and from moral and theological positions that I oppose. 

Yet, he also helps keep in mind that saying – to ever keep before me an awareness of the brevity of life.  As we’ve been in the US for a brief escape from the frontlines, as it were,  I also deeply feel the brevity of  life.  At 44 years of age I’ve probably lived over half my life. There is more to this life than pop culture and materialism. What are we going to do with the days we have left? 

Quotes from LeGault's "Think!"

Think! v. Blink!  

A culture of unaccountability is a culture without incentive, and a culture without incentive is the death of critical and creative thinking. (71)

…the huge, unprecedented boom in various learning disabilities is in keeping with America’s transformation from a self reliant culture to a culture of dependency . . . this trend to a shift in philosophical values, away from the common acceptance of the view that one’s shortcomings are a result of flawed character or lack of initiative and toward the idea of a self in which one’s flaws are a product of hardwired maladies and disorders. (95)

There is a burgeoning demand for reasons to believe we are guiltless. In essence, we have created a huge market for both disabilities and therapy. (96)

The rise of ‘stress,’ or rather the symptoms of stress, in contemporary society is a sign not only that more people are in difficult situations, but tellingly, that they are unable to respond to or think their way out of these situations. (160)

Anger, frustration, stress, and anxiety are themselves a form of information. They are the emotional precedent for critical and creative thinking. One of the main problems in contemporary society is that many people mistake the emotion for the thought. Difficulties, sensation, emotion, information – they’re the beginning of the heroic journey of the life of the mind, not its end.” (182)

The biggest puzzle is not solving and fixing problems per se, it is fixing the thinking that causes problems … But the complexity and severity of degree of these afflictions suggest an intellectual malaise consisting of . . . not merely …. a breakdown in thinking, but often a disconnect between thinking and action; a disjunction between plan and execution, between intent and result. (309-310)