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| I think more clearly when I am on the road, Marseille Harbour, May 2013. |
Lesson 1: The graveyards are full of indispensable men. Therefore:
No matter who you are, you need the right kind of friends, longevity, and favourable circumstances to be able to make your mark. I will not argue with those who proclaim that they are favoured by God, for I do not see how such an argument is resolvable, instead, for me, a general statement will suffice:
"Our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune must favour us if we are to reach it" - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: Or On Education, 1762.
Lesson 2: Almost any action is right in the right circumstances. Or not?!
In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, we find that virtue can be a vice and vice versa. Virtue is thus argued to be the mean or rather the right reaction in a given situation. The best example I read of this went along these lines: if you react violently because someone has spilled water in the garden, your reaction would count as a vice. But we should not be lulled into thinking that a mild reaction is the exemplar of virtue, a mild reaction to someone murdering your wife would be a vice too.
"Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy" - Aristotle.
Lesson 3: Envy no person who is alive. Which is not the same as player hating!
The understanding here is that you never know what tomorrow holds. Hard times can strike even the most affluent and secure through a concatenation that will look like a conspiracy in retrospect. The player hater approach is also valid but only if we envision people who live beyond their means as subject matter. The way I choose to understand this lesson is as in the quote immediately below. Of course sophists of all hues go even further and say if a man dies but his descendants become insecure, then even in death you cannot count the man lucky.
"...count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last” - Sophocles, Oedipus Rex.
Lesson 4: It is possible to be wrong even when you are absolutely sure you are right.
“Do not believe that you alone can be right. The man who thinks that, the man who maintains that only he has the power to reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul - A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty” - Sophocles, Antigone.
Lesson 5: Be equitable with those who are equitable towards you. It's only fair.
"We don't get to know people when they come to us; we must go to them to find out what they are like" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
These lessons are not free-standing, but interact and inform other lessons I have learned in the last year and, prior to that. I only raise these lessons to highlight what I feel is a transformation from my usual outlook: "the highest court on earth convenes on the battlefield."
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| I like to test my hypotheses in the theatre! Marseille, France, May 2013. |
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