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Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude—it is not simply the result of spare time, a holiday, a week-end or a vacation.

[…]

Leisure is not the attitude of mind of those who actively intervene, but of those who are open to everything; not of those who grab and grab hold, but of those who leave the reins loose and who are free and easy themselves—almost like a man falling asleep, for one can only fall asleep by ‘letting oneself go’.

- Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture

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Que signifie "humaniste" ?

ne veut pas dire, en tout cas, que je "crois en l'homme", au sens où certains font de l'humanisme une espèce de religion ! Pourquoi croire en l'homme, et qu'est-ce que cela pourrait signifier, puisque son existence ne fait pas de doute ? Et comment l'adorer, alors qu'il est si évidemment capable du pire, et si rarement du meilleur ?

L'humanisme, pour moi, n'est pas une religion ; c'est une morale. L'homme n'est pas notre Dieu ; il est notre prochain. Bref, je suis humaniste à la façon de Montaigne : non parce que je serais convaincu de la grandeur ou de la bonté de l'homme, mais parce que je lui pardonne sa petitesse, sa "misère", comme disait Pascal, et que j'essaie de contribuer, à mon niveau, avec mes moyens, à ses progrès, à ce que le même Pascal appelait sa "grandeur". C'est ce que j'ai appelé, à propos de Montaigne, un humanisme de la miséricorde.

Au reste, "l'homme" n'est qu'une abstraction. Ce qui existe, ce sont des hommes, des femmes, ils sont tous différents, et tous ont à devenir humains, au sens normatif du terme (au sens ou l'humanité n'est pas seulement une espèce animale, homo sapiens sapiens, mais aussi une vertu : le contraire de l'inhumanité). C'est ce qui me permet d'articuler ce qu'Althusser appelait "l'antihumanisme théorique", celui des sciences humaines, avec ce que j'appelle l'humanisme pratique, celui de la morale ou de n'importe qui.

L'humanité n'est pas un principe mais un résultat, pas une essence mais une espèce (animale) et une valeur (historique). Le passage de celle-là à celle-ci, c'est ce qu'on appelle la civilisation : passage toujours fragile, toujours à reprendre et à continuer ! On ne naît pas humain (au sens normatif du terme), on le devient.

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Let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

Carl Sagan died on this day in 1996 and left us his increasingly timely wisdom on how to move beyond “us” vs. “them” and meet ignorance with kindness.  (via explore-blog)

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“What are we in this conversation for?” Is our primary motivation to change each other’s minds? If that’s the case, I’m generally not interested, because in most cases I don’t think that’s going to happen. However, if we are in conversation to discover whether we have a human bond on which we might build something larger—including some sort of personal transformation—that’s a conversation I’d really like to join.

Collegeville Institute Greats: Parker J. Palmer, Part Two

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I had no mother tongue, which, contrary to conventional wisdom, is not uncommon. In Sweden, you have Finnish as well as Swedish; in Malaysia, people speak three languages. The idea of a ‘mother tongue’ is a highly romantic and nationalist one. My multilinguism enabled me to teach, and to write After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, and to feel at home everywhere. Every language is an open window on the world. This is in contrast to the grim attachment to roots advocated by someone like Maurice Barrès. Trees have roots; I have legs. And believe me, that is a huge advantage.

George Steiner, a certain idea of knowledge | Presseurop (English)

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The Tower of Babel (1563), oil on board, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna | artwork by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

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Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Here are the top five regrets of the dying, as witnessed by Ware: 1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard. 3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. 4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Top five regrets of the dying | guardian.co.uk

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Packing like a Pro (by eviltommy)

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«Nomás así es la pinche globalización, güey. Fíjate que cuando en Japón les va a toda madre y andan sobrados de lana, aquí ni cuenta nos damos. Pero si va un tsunami y los chinga, entonces aquí todos nos jodemos.»

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No habitamos un país: habitamos una lengua. Yo habito la lengua catalana. Una lengua que estuvo prohibida

"Educar es enseñar al joven a estar a solas consigo mismo"

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In a study appropriately titled ‘Very Happy People,’ researchers sought out the characteristics of the happiest 10 percent among us. Do they all live in warm climates? Are they all wealthy? Are they all physically fit? Turns out, there was one—and only one—characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships.

How To Be Happy. (via explore-blog)

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Alma flamenca

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Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day…. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

The New York Times

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Tim Kreider takes down the ‘busy’ trap

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¿Qué diferencia ve entre el jugador de hace veinte años y el de ahora?

Antes eran más sufridos y trabajadores. Ahora son más delicados y señoritos. Son las comodidades de la vida, lo tienen todo.

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The entire idea of rereading implies just such a likeable and progressive assumption about life, one that’s meant to keep us interested in living it: namely, that as you get further along, you find out more valuable stuff; familiarity doesn’t always give way to dreary staleness, but often in fact to celestial understandings; that life and literature both are layered affairs you can work down through. […] Rereading a treasured and well-used book is a very different enterprise from reading a book the first time. It’s not that you don’t enter the same river twice. You actually do. It’s just not the same you who does the entering. By the time you get to the second go-round, you probably know—and know more about—what you don’t know, and are possibly more comfortable with that, at least in theory. And you come to a book the second or third time with a different hunger, a more settled sense about how far off the previously-mentioned great horizon really is for you, and what you do and don’t have time for, and what you might reasonably hope to gain from a later look.

Richard Ford on rereading. Lest we forget, Nabokov put it best: “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” (via explore-blog)

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“Companies generally rely on performance-based pay, compensating workers based on the estimated value that they add to corporate performance. Management experts have long recognized a problem with this approach: the difficulty of estimating how much value a person adds. But there might be another, more basic problem: added value may have more to do with group dynamics than with the achievements of individual employees—which means employees should perhaps be compensated accordingly.”

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la felicidad radica en tener proyectos en la vida más que en contar con muchos recursos. El hombre que tiene proyectos, que está ilusionado, que es capaz de crear... es un hombre que tiende a conseguir su felicidad.

«El gran problema de las empresas suele ser más personal que técnico». elnortedecastilla.es