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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!

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To: Bob Lao-Tse who wrote (39509)	6/7/1999 12:32:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) of 108807

Wow, Bob. There is so much here with which I ... resonate. >I believe that the most important things in the world are moderation and consideration. < The word I like is "balance". This is one of my highest principles. Almost any ethos, be it of a Priest or a Trader or an Aesthete or <whatever> - it is prone to absurdity if taken to its logical extremes. My soft doctrine of "balance" seeks to reconcile the edges of principle with the chaos of real life. As you can imagine it is not very clearly formulated. A buddy who knows more of these things than I do calls me an "accedental Taoist". I'm unversed in formal Taoism (you must have the drop on me there unless your choice of name is coincidence) so I can't compare and contrast. >Of course, that faith is dashed to the rocks daily by the reality of what people are, but somehow I don't lose hold of it.< Taken one at a time we can be such trying cases. But a thing that sustains me is that even with all the steps backward - the nuke tests and school shootings and jungle strippings - I feel like the overall direction is still Forward. In the past 50 years we have gone into space and back. We have turned a spotlight on the plight of women and minorities in the rich countries, and are perhaps beginning to grapple in earnest with the plight of the poor, hungry and desperate people in the rest of the world. We have transformed smallpox from a disfigurer of entire nations into a ghost story told to children at bedtime. All this gives me hope that the future is not a bleak place. I am very worried that this has been a creeping mythos feeding on people of my generation - that we have turned from Progress to a global Endgame, that our grandchildren are perhaps better off never born. This to me is evil. The most horrible thing to do to youngsters is to take away hope, a worthy collective goal. When it reduces to individual and group survival - you get Littleton and Paducah and all that. It was pronounced sixty years ago and bears repeating in paraphrase: We have nothing to fear [so much as] fear itself. About driving - Maybe four years ago I came to the quietly startling conclusion that the single highest driving virtue is Inconspicuity. It does not mean avoid driving a Cobra. It means if you have a Cobra or a Tercel - drive it so you don't draw attention. I strive for this but I'm not there yet. I still pass people sometimes. :-( It takes really good driving to be Inconspicuous. You have to read traffic patterns well ahead of time to match your vectors with minimal control input. And you have to make the deliberate decision to forgive stupid or mean actions by your immediate neighbors. I'm working on that, I really am. When the driver next to me has no reason to worry about what I'm gonna do next, I've "succeeded." :-) I've read a post about the need to drive fast. I submit that driving fast and Inconspicuity can be reconciled without loss of the timeliness objective. The "trick" is to make the transitions - lane changes, control inputs etc. - seamless and gradual. Fast drivers don't get my concerned attention. Not if they have a good eye for separation in space and respect for differential velocity in close quarters. Erratic or unforgiving ones (like the occasional dillhole who performs a lane-change around me missing my bumpers by inches because he's Instructing Me to hold my speed and lane, or else) do make me pay real attention - and draw my annoyance for demanding it.

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