mind

Day 2880, our nature.

Daily picture, My thoughts

This morning I was enjoying a beautiful sunrise. In a world where the news is filled with a lot of negativity, these sunrises remind me that most people probably have a normal day, with normal day problems and joys like seeing a sunrise and that all that negativity will never touch us directly. How we cope with our daily foibles depends in a great part on who we are, but these problems are, for the most part, and often only in our heads. 

It is not hard to imagine what terrible things we do to each other. You probably never witness it but you have seen it on the news or read about it in the newspaper or a good book. For most of us these problems, all these wars and negativity are just stories, they might as well be specially made for you like in the movie The Truman Show. Are you going to check if it all is real? Of course, it is real, but as real as a thunderstorm in western Africa is real for you. We know that innocent people die, that is what we humans do. Trump might become the next president and destroy America, but that is also old news. I think that it is hubris of us so called modern people to think that this thin layer of sophistication and scientific inside we feel lately makes us behave any different than we did a thousand years ago or even three thousand years ago. 

Ten thousand people fear for their lives this morning because of the bombs that might fall. A man who was chosen by their people to do that job cannot be stopped by other governments let alone by us. There is no rationale in it, hence the frustration we feel, like the frustration you feel when you walk into a thunderstorm on your way home. The world is not bad because it rains when inconvenient, the world is just the world, and we are all subject to the forces that rule nature because we are part of nature. And who do you blame, that one politician? While thousands of soldiers do what they are told to do and millions cheer them on. How can you ever punish a whole group of people, a whole country? Do you punish yourself because the money you give to your government is used to buy bombs that most likely have killed? There is no hiding and blaming because we are all the same and are all at least guilty by association. We are as guilty as the crocodile is when chewing on your leg when given the chance.  

Just enjoy the sunrise and go outside when dark clouds move above and forget your rain jacket. 

Day 2877, driven.

Daily picture, Quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will To Power
Book Two: Critique of Highest Values

259 Insight: all evaluation is made from a definite perspective: that of the preservation of the individual, a community, a race, a  state, a church, a faith, a culture.- Because we forget that valua­tion is always from a perspective, a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and con­sequently of contradictory drives. This is the expression of the diseased condition in man, in contrast to the animals in which all existing instincts answer to quite definite tasks.

Day 2869, nihilism.

Daily picture, Quotes

Several notes from Nietzsche written in 1987 are to be found in the book The Will to Power, a collection of his notes published after his death and not meant for publication. 

Friedrich Nietzsche

The Will to Power
Book One: European Nihilism

What does nihilism mean? That the highest values evaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; “why?” finds no answer.

The supreme values in whose service man should live, especially when they were very hard on him and exacted a high price – these social values were erected over man to strengthen their voice, as if they were commands of God, as “reality,” as the “true” world, as a hope and future world. Now that the shabby origin of these values is becoming clear, the universe seems to have lost value, seems “meaningless”-but that is only a transitional stage. 

Values and their changes are related to increases in the power of those positing the values. The measure of unbelief, of permitted “freedom of the spirit” as an expression of an increase in power. “Nihilism” an ideal of the highest degree of powerfulness of the spirit, the over-richest life-partly destructive, partly ironic.

Day 2867, old poem.

Daily picture, Poetry
Poem in Dutch, 2006
Through the snow I continue where the path ends

the path that took me to that which is unexpected

thinking we know where we are going understand

what am I doing here what am I doing in the snow

I can give you reason or two maybe three or more

so what is true of all of this or what will value have

the cold snow on the ground I fall into is full of this

unthinkable thoughts a never-conceivable realities

without reason it wants to give anything the truth

It happens spontaneously in passing just like that

don't think too much think like a child every day

without a past dare to fall into the cold snow

do not be afraid of the wet or the blame

wet cloth can dry the days disappear

disappearing into the horizons

the one that is behind you

full of old imaginations

heavy as a burden

denied bitterness

you will forget

what it was 

as a child

to be to

fall in

snow

Wet

am 

I



that

is like

to become

a child

play