Failing Upwards Quotes

I am but a poor struggling soul yearning to be wholly good, wholly truthful and wholly non-violent in thought, word and deed, but ever failing to reach the ideal which I know to be true. It is a painful climb, but each step upwards makes me feel stronger and fit for the next.

When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.

Jesus praised faith and trust – even more than love. It takes a foundational trust to fall, or to fail, and not to fall apart.

The criers of the Mysteries speak again, bidding all men welcome to the House of Light. The great institution of materiality has failed. The false civilization built by man has turned, and like the monster of Frankenstein, is destroying its creator. Religion wanders aimlessly in the maze of theological speculation. Science batters itself impotently against the barriers of the unknown. Only transcendental philosophy knows the path. Only the illumined reason can carry the understanding part of man upward to the light. Only philosophy can teach man to be born well, to live well, to die well, and in perfect measure be born again. Into this band of the elect--those who have chosen the life of knowledge, of virtue, and of utility--the philosophers of the ages invite YOU.

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have little to communicate.

Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace. They are fortunate beings. They do not need to apprehend the significance of things. They do not grow weary nor miss step, nor do they fall out of rank and sink by the wayside to be left contemplating the moving procession. Ah! that moving procession that has left me by the road-side! Its fantastic colors are more brilliant and beautiful than the sun on the undulating waters. What matter if souls and bodies are failing beneath the feet of the ever-pressing multitude! It moves with the majestic rhythm of the spheres. Its discordant clashes sweep upward in one harmonious tone that blends with the music of other worlds--to complete God's orchestra. It is greater than the stars--that moving procession of human energy; greater than the palpitating earth and the things growing thereon. Oh! I could weep at being left by the wayside; left with the grass and the clouds and a few dumb animals. True, I feel at home in the society of these symbols of life's immutability. In the procession I should feel the crushing feet, the clashing discords, the ruthless hands and stifling breath. I could not hear the rhythm of the march. Salve! ye dumb hearts. Let us be still and wait by the roadside.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. [...] Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head. It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It is not that suffering or failure might happen, or that it will only happen to you if you are bad (which is what religious people often think), or that it will happen to the unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it. No, it will happen, and to you! Losing, failing, falling, sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences—all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey.

I thank you, Wilhelm, for your heartfelt sympathy, for your well-intentioned advice, but beg you to be quiet. Let me stick it out. Blessedly exhausted as I am, I have strength enough to carry through. I honor religion, you know that, I feel it is a staff for many weary souls, refreshment for many a one who is pining away. But--can it be, must it be, the same thing for everyone? If you look at the great world, you see thousands for whom it wasn't, thousands for whom it will not be the same, preached or unpreached, and must it then be the same for me? Does not the son of God Himself say that those would be around Him whom the Father had given Him? But if I am not given? If the Father wants to keep me for Himself, as my heart tells me?--I beg you, do not misinterpret this, do not see mockery in these innocent words. What I am laying before you is my whole soul; otherwise I would rather have kept silent, as I do not like to lose words over things that everyone knows as little about as I do. What else is it but human destiny to suffer out one's measure, drink up one's cup?--And if the chalice was too bitter for the God from heaven on His human lips, why should I boast and pretend that it tastes sweet to me? And why should I be ashamed in the terrible moment when my entire being trembles between being and nothingness, since the past flashes like lightning above the dark abyss of the future and everything around me is swallowed up, and the world perishes with me?--Is that not the voice of the creature thrown back on itself, failing, trapped, lost, and inexorably tumbling downward, the voice groaning in the inner depths of its vainly upwards-struggling energies: My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me? And if I should be ashamed of the expression, should I be afraid when facing that moment, since it did not escape Him who rolls up heaven like a carpet?

Appearances are deceiving. *Having* authority is not the same as *being* an authority. *Having* the right and *being* the right are not the same either. Being promoted doesn't necessarily mean you're doing good work and it doesn't mean you are worthy of promotion (they call it failing upward in such bureaucracies). *Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.* To be or to do - life is a constant roll call.

Season late, day late, sun just down, and the sky Cold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she, From water the color of sky except where Her motion has fractured it to shivering splinters of silver, Rises. Stands on the raw grass. Against The new-curdling night of spruces, nakedness Glimmers and, at bosom and flank, drips With fluent silver. The man, Some ten strokes out, but now hanging Motionless in the gunmetal water, feet Cold with the coldness of depth, all History dissolving from him, is Nothing but an eye. Is an eye only. Sees The body that is marked by his use, and Time's, Rise, and in the abrupt and unsustaining element of air, Sway, lean, grapple the pond-bank. Sees How, with that posture of female awkwardness that is, And is the stab of, suddenly perceived grace, breasts bulge down in The pure curve of their weight and buttocks Moon up and, in swelling unity, Are silver and glimmer. Then The body is erect, she is herself, whatever Self she may be, and with an end of the towel grasped in each hand, Slowly draws it back and forth across back and buttocks, but With face lifted toward the high sky, where The over-wash of rose color now fails. Fails, though no star Yet throbs there. The towel, forgotten, Does not move now. The gaze Remains fixed on the sky. The body, Profiled against the darkness of spruces, seems To draw to itself, and condense in its whiteness, what light In the sky yet lingers or, from The metallic and abstract severity of water, lifts. The body, With the towel now trailing loose from one hand, is A white stalk from which the face flowers gravely toward the high sky. This moment is non-sequential and absolute, and admits Of no definition, for it Subsumes all other, and sequential, moments, by which Definition might be possible. The woman, Face yet raised, wraps, With a motion as though standing in sleep, The towel about her body, under her breasts, and, Holding it there hieratic as lost Egypt and erect, Moves up the path that, stair-steep, winds Into the clamber and tangle of growth. Beyond The lattice of dusk-dripping leaves, whiteness Dimly glimmers, goes. Glimmers and is gone, and the man, Suspended in his darkling medium, stares Upward where, though not visible, he knows She moves, and in his heart he cries out that, if only He had such strength, he would put his hand forth And maintain it over her to guard, in all Her out-goings and in-comings, from whatever Inclemency of sky or slur of the world's weather Might ever be. In his heart he cries out. Above Height of the spruce-night and heave of the far mountain, he sees The first star pulse into being. It gleams there. I do not know what promise it makes him.

1 One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked. A voice asked: “Who is there?” He answered: “It is I.” The voice said: “There is no room here for me and thee.” The door was shut. After a year of solitude and deprivation this man returned to the door of the Beloved. He knocked. A voice from within asked: “Who is there?” The man said: “It is Thou.” The door was opened for him. 2 The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere, they’re in each other all along. 3 Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity. The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death. Tomorrow, when resurrection comes, The heart that is not in love will fail the test. 4 When your chest is free of your limiting ego, Then you will see the ageless Beloved. You can not see yourself without a mirror; Look at the Beloved, He is the brightest mirror. 5 Your love lifts my soul from the body to the sky And you lift me up out of the two worlds. I want your sun to reach my raindrops, So your heat can raise my soul upward like a cloud. 6 There is a candle in the heart of man, waiting to be kindled. In separation from the Friend, there is a cut waiting to be stitched. O, you who are ignorant of endurance and the burning fire of love– Love comes of its own free will, it can’t be learned in any school. 7 There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences. With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets. There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.

Successful gamblers, instead, think of the future as speckles of probability, flickering upward and downward like a stock market ticker to every new jolt of information.

She lies awake at night, staring upward, remembering being right next to the only discovery that matters. Life was whispering instructions to her, and she failed to write them down.

For a migratory bird, there is one supreme truth, “Sky is the freedom.” If it enters into a room by accident, it tries to get out by flying upward. It keeps banging its head against the ceiling. It fails to find the door or windows because it firmly believes that freedom is upward, not sideways. Challenge your existing beliefs no matter how true they seem to you.

Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either. Being promoted doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing good work and it doesn’t mean you are worthy of promotion (they call it failing upward in such bureaucracies). Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.

Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means, not self-pity or remorse, but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look, not backward with regret, but forward with hope - not downwards at our own shortcomings, but upwards at God's love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. To repent is to open our eyes to the light. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life.

So tired am I, so weary of to-day, So unrefreshed from foregone weariness, So overburdened by foreseen distress, So lagging and so stumbling on my way, I scarce can rouse myself to watch or pray, To hope, or aim, or toil for more or less,-- Ah, always less and less, even while I press Forward and toil and aim as best I may. Half-starved of soul and heartsick utterly, Yet lift I up my heart and soul and eyes Which fail in looking upward

These men who harass women online were all owed something very simple at one time - respect, love, affection, he basic decency of living upwards and not curling inwards, a humane education - and someone, along the line, failed them.

Love is an excellent thing and a very great blessing, indeed. It makes every difficulty easy. It bears a burden without being weighted, and renders sweet all that is bitter. Love knows no limits, feels no burden, thinks nothing of troubles, attempts more than it is able, because it believes that it may and can do all things; for this reason it is able to do all, performing much where he who does not love fails and falls. Love is watchful. Sleeping, it does not slumber. Like a living flame, a burning torch, it tends upward and passes unharmed through every obstacle.” Whatever faults may be committed, big or small, whatever clouds may pile up on the horizon, dark and threatening, love will overcome all.

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.

Nobody has failed upward as consistently and spectacularly as the ostensible leader of the shrinking free world. Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.

We passed the Irish club, and the florist’s with its small stiff pink-and-white carnations in a bucket, and the drapers called ‘Elvina’s’, which displayed in its window Bear Brand stockings and knife-pleated skirts like cloth concertinas and pasty-shaped hats on false heads. We passed the confectioner’s – or failed to pass it; the window attracted Karina. She balled her hands into her pockets, and leant back, her feet apart; she looked rooted, immovable. The cakes were stacked on decks of sloping shelves, set out on pink doilies whitened by falls of icing sugar. There were vanilla slices, their airy tiers of pastry glued together with confectioners’ custard, fat and lolling like a yellow tongue. There were bubbling jam puffs and ballooning Eccles cakes, slashed to show their plump currant insides. There were jam tarts the size of traffic lights; there were whinberry pies oozing juice like black blood. ‘Look at them buns,’ Karina would say. ‘Look.’ I would turn sideways and see her intent face. Sometimes the tip of her tongue would appear, and slide slowly upwards towards her flat nose. There were sponge buns shaped like fat mushrooms, topped with pink icing and half a glace cherry. There were coconut pyramids, and low square house-shaped chocolate buns, finished with a big roll of chocolate-wrapped marzipan which was solid as the barrel of a cannon.

Eat carbohydrates and blood sugar rises. Every first-year medical student knows this, every nurse or diabetes educator knows this, every person with diabetes who performs finger-stick blood sugars before and after meals knows this. Eat any food with more than just a few grams of carbohydrates and blood sugar will rise; the more carbohydrates you eat, the higher blood sugar will rise. Everyone also knows that foods like butter do not raise blood sugar, nor will a fatty cut of meat, olives, green bell peppers, broccoli, or chicken liver. And since the 1980s, when the sharp upward climb in type 2 diabetes (and obesity) began, the only component of diet that has increased is carbohydrates, not fat or proteins.4

I answer that, It must be said that every evil in some way has a cause. For evil is the absence of the good, which is natural and due to a thing. But that anything fail from its natural and due disposition can come only from some cause drawing it out of its proper disposition. For a heavy thing is not moved upwards except by some impelling force; nor does an agent fail in its action except from some impediment. But only good can be a cause; because nothing can be a cause except inasmuch as it is a being, and every being, as such, is good.

The importance of the Industrial Revolution is hard to overstate. Throughout essentially all of human history, economic growth had proceeded at a rate of perhaps 0.1 percent per year, enough to allow for a very gradual increase in population, but not any growth in per capita living standards.26 And then, suddenly, there was progress when there had been none. Economic growth began to zoom upward much faster than the growth rate of the population, as it has continued to do through to the present day, the occasional global financial meltdown notwithstanding.27

This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When

Literature...describes a descent. First, gods. Then demigods. Then epic became tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then the gentry. Then the middle class and its mercantile dreams. Then it was about you--Gina, Gilda: social realism. Then it was about them: lowlife. Villains. The ironic age...Literature, for a while, can be about us...:about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this? And he asked them: Whither the novel? ... Supposing...that the progress of literature (downward) was forced in that direction by the progress of cosmology (upward--up, up). For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation. Always hysterically but less and less fiercely resisted, as one illusion after another fell away.

I miss my mother." Mrs. Norton touched Trudy's shoulder in silent sympathy. "She never had a chance to see any of her daughters get married." Trudy laid the veil on the bed. "It's hard to completely enjoy your wedding day when your mother isn't with you." "Your mother did see your sisters wed and I'm sure she'll be with you today." Trudy looked at the woman, astonished she hadn't received a more pious answer from a minister's wife. She pointed a finger upward. "I know she's in heaven." Mrs. Norton gently folded Trudy's hand until her palm rested on her chest, "In heaven and in your heart, love never fails, my dear Ms. Bower. I know it's not the same as feeling your mother's arms around you on such a special day, nevertheless, I'm sure she's sending you plenty of love.

Man is the first product of evolution to be capable of controlling evolutionary destiny.'" Endowed as he is with reasoning powers, he must independently decide up on his own behavior, without the compelling guidance by instinct. Supplied with mind, he is expected to cooperate consciously with nature in her further evolutionary program. Unfortunately humanity has arrantly failed to make a serious effort to promote its own further progress. Instead of using the power of the mind to understand the responsibilities which freedom from blind obedience to instinct entails, mankind has refused to listen whenever it was reminded of the requirements of the evolutionary law. It was so much easier to lend an ear to the promptings of desire, which was an unknown element up to the human stage. It must have been very soon after the acquisition of mental self-consciousness and his becoming aware of stirrings of primitive impulses, that man began to use the mind to stimulate the desires of the body. In this way he has indulged the almost negligible sexual impulse which he inherited from the animal kingdom, until it has become a desire so strong that he has difficulty to control it. Overstimulated by this unnaturally strong desire of his own making, man has looked for arbitrary ways in which to gratify it. Although reducing actual reproduction, he has discovered ways of unreproductive sexual action. But every such act, whatever form it takes, is a misuse of sex and uses up some of the life force that should be utilized for the support and the development of higher faculties. "The record of our race progress clearly shows how our upward movement has been checked ... by that misuse.

Trust His Promises This is my comfort in my affliction: Your promise has given me life. Psalm 119:50 HCSB God’s promises are found in a book like no other: the Holy Bible. It is a roadmap for life here on earth and for life eternal. As Christians, we are called upon to trust its promises, to follow its commandments, and to share its Good News. As believers, we must study the Bible daily and meditate upon its meaning for our lives. Otherwise, we deprive ourselves of a priceless gift from our Creator. God’s Holy Word is, indeed, a transforming, life-changing, one-of-a-kind treasure. And, a passing acquaintance with the Good Book is insufficient for Christians who seek to obey God’s Word and to understand His will. God has made promises to mankind and to you. God’s promises never fail and they never grow old. You must trust those promises and share them with your family, with your friends, and with the world. Joy is not mere happiness. Nor does joy spring from a life of ease, comfort, or peaceful circumstances. Joy is the soul’s buoyant response to a God of promise, presence, and power. Susan Lenzkes Claim all of God’s promises in the Bible. Your sins, your worries, your life—you may cast them all on Him. Corrie ten Boom We have ample evidence that the Lord is able to guide. The promises cover every imaginable situation. All we need to do is to take the hand He stretches out. Elisabeth Elliot Do not be afraid, then, that if you trust, or tell others to trust, the matter will end there. Trust is only the beginning and the continual foundation. When we trust Him, the Lord works, and His work is the important part of the whole matter. Hannah Whitall Smith Brother, is your faith looking upward today? / Trust in the promise of the Savior. / Sister, is the light shining bright on your way? / Trust in the promise of thy Lord. Fanny Crosby The meaning of hope isn’t just some flimsy wishing. It’s a firm confidence in God’s promises—that He will ultimately set things right. Sheila Walsh

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

Have no anxiety about anything,' Paul writes to the Philippians. In one sense it is like telling a woman with a bad head cold not to sniffle and sneeze so much or a lame man to stop dragging his feet. Or maybe it is more like telling a wino to lay off the booze or a compulsive gambler to stay away from the track. Is anxiety a disease or an addiction? Perhaps it is something of both. Partly, perhaps, because you can't help it, and partly because for some dark reason you choose not to help it, you torment yourself with detailed visions of the worst that can possibly happen. The nagging headache turns out to be a malignant brain tumor. When your teenage son fails to get off the plane you've gone to meet, you see his picture being tacked up in the post office among the missing and his disappearance never accounted for. As the latest mid-East crisis boils, you wait for the TV game show to be interrupted by a special bulletin to the effect that major cities all over the country are being evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear attack. If Woody Allen were to play your part on the screen, you would roll in the aisles with the rest of them, but you're not so much as cracking a smile at the screen inside your own head. Does the terrible fear of disaster conceal an even more terrible hankering for it? Do the accelerated pulse and the knot in the stomach mean that, beneath whatever their immediate cause, you are acting out some ancient and unresolved drama of childhood? Since the worst things that happen are apt to be the things you don't see coming, do you think there is a kind of magic whereby, if you only can see them coming, you will be able somehow to prevent them from happening? Who knows the answer? In addition to Novocain and indoor plumbing, one of the few advantages of living in the twentieth century is the existence of psychotherapists, and if you can locate a good one, maybe one day you will manage to dig up an answer that helps. But answer or no answer, the worst things will happen at last even so. 'All life is suffering' says the first and truest of the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, by which he means that sorrow, loss, death await us all and everybody we love. Yet "the Lord is at hand. Have no anxiety about anything," Paul writes, who was evidently in prison at the time and with good reason to be anxious about everything, 'but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.' He does not deny that the worst things will happen finally to all of us, as indeed he must have had a strong suspicion they were soon to happen to him. He does not try to minimize them. He does not try to explain them away as God's will or God's judgment or God's method of testing our spiritual fiber. He simply tells the Philippians that in spite of them—even in the thick of them—they are to keep in constant touch with the One who unimaginably transcends the worst things as he also unimaginably transcends the best. 'In everything,' Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come Hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that 'the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.' The worst things will surely happen no matter what—that is to be understood—but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be "in Christ," as he puts it. Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, death can get at us there. That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, "Have no anxiety about anything." Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, 'Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say, Rejoice!

The first mile was torture. I passed beneath the massive stone arch at the entrance to the school, pulled off the road and threw up. I felt better and ran down the long palm-lined drive to the Old Quad. Lost somewhere in the thicket to my left was the mausoleum containing the remains of the family by whom the university had been founded. Directly ahead of me loomed a cluster of stone buildings, the Old Quad. I stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into a dusty courtyard which, with its clumps of spindly bushes and cacti, resembled the garden of a desert monastery. All around me the turrets and dingy stone walls radiated an ominous silence, as if behind each window there stood a soldier with a musket waiting to repel any invader. I looked up at the glittering facade of the chapel across which there was a mosaic depicting a blond Jesus and four angels representing Hope, Faith, Charity, and, for architectural rather than scriptural symmetry, Love. In its gloomy magnificence, the Old Quad never failed to remind me of the presidential palace of a banana republic. Passing out of the quad I cut in front of the engineering school and headed for a back road that led up to the foothills. There was a radar installation at the summit of one of the hills called by the students the Dish. It sat among herds of cattle and the ruins of stables. It, too, was a ruin, shut down for many years, but when the wind whistled through it, the radar produced a strange trilling that could well be music from another planet. The radar was silent as I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my breath from the upward climb. I was soaked with sweat, and my headache was gone, replaced by giddy disorientation. It was a clear, hot morning. Looking north and west I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky. The city from this aspect appeared guileless and serene. Yet, when I walked in its streets what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but from angles, darkening the corners of things. You would look up at the eaves of a house expecting to see a gargoyle rather than the intricate but innocent woodwork. The city had this shadowy presence as if it was a living thing with secrets and memories. Its temperament was too much like my own for me to feel safe or comfortable there. I looked briefly to the south where San Jose sprawled beneath a polluted sky, ugly and raw but without secrets or deceit. Then I stretched and began the slow descent back into town.

Unless we mix faith with our hearing of the Word, unless we receive the truths we hear as a message from heaven, to be carefully studied, to be eaten by the soul and assimilated into the spiritual life, we lose the impression of the Spirit of God. We do not understand by experience what it means to find rest by receiving the divine assurances of the Word. The importance of studying the Word cannot be overestimated. Its promises are large, and full of richness. In no case should we fail of securing the heavenly treasure. Christ is our only security.—The Upward Look, p. 75.

GOAT HOUR GOSPEL (SUCH SALVAGE) BY MARK WAGENAAR   Just as the evening’s about to move on, they appear, not as the apparitional deer— here, & gone in the next moment, without a sound—but one by one, bumbling through briar, chewing through poison ivy, sniffing at trees. A slow procession walking beneath elms & birches that hold up the last light. And you’re alone with the traces of things, the news in front of you: the crooked skeleton of Richard III was dug up from a parking lot, humpbacked, once buried in his boots & battlefield wounds. Nearby a lost river has been uncovered, & coughed up its mouthful of Roman skulls. No relic is safe, it seems, from an invisible tide that presses them upward. Sometimes it’s not the loss that hurts but the indignities of the discovery. And yet beside the diggers & builders of new things is this mangy congregation, pushing through the scrub without a trail or blueprint or direction. Their dirty white fur shines a little in this late, lost hour. They bleat as they shamble & piss on each other without warning, or maybe as a warning, or in greeting. They’ll eat anything—tin can, T-shirt, canvas sack, bones of animals & kings, & carry them awhile. And so do we: each night, across the country, people turn up at hospitals unable to speak, for the needle or nail lodged in their throats. They’re unable to explain why, but we know— that desperate mix of need & panic that can drive us to keep something safe for good. These dearest items take your words & leave them luminous, radiolucent, shining on the X-ray, like this swallowed ring: a ghostly eclipse. Small comfort to share an appetite with these goats, this dishevelled lot. But a comfort, too, to know that some things will be saved from the soil, rescued from time’s indignities, if only for a little while, & by these scruffy reliquaries, on the other side of the valley now, flickering slightly as they near the vanishing point of the timberline. And we might call such salvage mercy . And it must be even for the undeserving, for those of us who didn’t live right, or live best. Whatever that means. Mercy will find us, even when we fail to recognize it, when we least expect it.

The Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal) - Clip This Article on Location 1055 | Added on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 5:10:24 PM OPINION Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn | 801 words For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. The other group tut-tuts about root causes. Take your pick: inequality, poverty, injustice. Or, as President Obama intimated in an ugly aside on the rioting, a Republican Congress that will never agree to the “massive investments” (in other words, billions more in federal spending) required “if we are serious about solving this problem.” There is another view. In this view, the disaster of inner cities isn’t primarily about race at all. It’s about the consequences of 50 years of progressive misrule—which on race has proved an equal-opportunity failure. Baltimore is but the latest liberal-blue city where government has failed to do the one thing it ought—i.e., put the cops on the side of the vulnerable and law-abiding—while pursuing “solutions” that in practice enfeeble families and social institutions and local economies. These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning. If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence. How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create. Remember, in the mid-1960s when President Johnson put a face on America’s “war on poverty,” he didn’t do it from an urban ghetto. He did it from the front porch of a shack in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County, where a white family of 10 eked out a subsistence living on an income of $400 a year. In many ways, rural Martin County and urban Baltimore could not be more different. Martin County is 92% white while Baltimore is two-thirds black. Each has seen important sources of good-paying jobs dry up—Martin County in coal mining, Baltimore in manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Martin Country voted 6 to 1 for Mitt Romney while Baltimore went 9 to 1 for Barack Obama. Yet the Great Society’s legacy has been depressingly similar. In a remarkable dispatch two years ago, the Lexington Herald-Leader’s John Cheves noted that the war on poverty sent $2.1 billion to Martin County alone (pop. 12,537) through programs including “welfare, food stamps, jobless benefits, disability compensation, school subsidies, affordable housing, worker training, economic development incentives, Head Start for poor children and expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” The result? “The problem facing Appalachia today isn’t Third World poverty,” writes Mr. Cheves. “It’s dependence on government assistance.” Just one example: When Congress imposed work requirements and lifetime caps for welfare during the Clinton administration, claims of disability jumped. Mr. Cheves quotes

Around here, people fail upwards.

Uplift suasion also failed to account for the widespread belief in the extraordinary Negro, which had dominated assimilationist and abolitionist thinking in America for a century. Upwardly mobile Blacks were regularly cast aside as unique and as different from ordinary, inferior Black people.

Just remember this: no one can keep you from the second half of your own life except yourself. Nothing can inhibit your second journey except your own lack of courage, patience, and imagination. Your second journey is all yours to walk or to avoid. My conviction is that some falling apart of the first journey is necessary for this to happen, so do not waste a moment of time lamenting poor parenting, lost job, failed relationship, physical handicap, gender identity, economic poverty, or even the tragedy of any kind of abuse. Pain is part of the deal. If you don't walk into the second half of your own life, it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true, and beautiful. All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring.

American educational institutions were failing at this, instead becoming politically craven institutions offering, at best, upward mobility. Rather than promoting intellectualism and cultural enrichment, they are purveyors of “the trivia of vocational tricks and adjustment to life—meaning the slack life of the masses.

Steve’s eyebrows arched upward. “You two would rather share a room?” His expression was a familiar one. We’ve been seeing it from teachers, friends, colleagues, and hotel concierges since we hit puberty. It’s the “you’d rather share a room with your opposite-gender sibling than sleep alone?” face, and it never fails to irritate me. Social norms can bite me. If I need to have someone guarding my back when the living dead show up to make my life more interesting than I want it to be, I want that someone to be Shaun. He’s a light sleeper, and I know he can aim.

Lack of groundedness due to spiritual “highs.” When you work through and into the depths of your rebirth, you may occasionally find yourself "strong" emotionally, and you will be much less rooted in your earthen body whenever this occurs. This "danger," as mentioned in the introduction paragraph to this section, is more like a symptom. Most people will experience that groundlessness through the kundalini awakening excitement. Your higher chakras will be wide open, and you'll have the ability to be overwhelmed by what you can now experience. Whenever you feel like this–dreamy, disturbed, floaty, almost cloud-like–start a deep breath. Make one hand into your navel's fist and imagine you could drop a cord straight down into the earth from this spot in your body. Felt grounded and affirmed with your human body as this cord drops and connects with nature. This simulation will relieve these "high" symptoms as they occur. • Jerkiness & muscle spasms As with the argument just above, jerkiness and muscle spasms are signs of kundalini awakening that will undergo much (if not all) of their systems. It is only coded as a "risk" or "danger" because the individual may not think that these actions are linked to his or her awakening and are scared of his or her own well-being. If you ever have occasional spasms or unwanted jerks, take a deep breath and try to feel at ease. These are normal and will pass, "growing pains" synonymous with awakening. Ultimately, you will no longer have them at all, but for now, breathe deeply, and accept them. They're, believe it or not, a good sign. • Finding yourself alone in the “dark night of the soul.” Another symptom of awakening is the "dark night of the soul" experience. This period of time will come to pass for anyone involved in kundalini awakening, and it's not necessarily a fun time, which is why it's coded as a "danger" or "risk." Essentially, the "dark night of the soul" is when you feel like you've hit the lowest low. It's the time you confront all the defects within yourself and know that you can only step upwards, which is an overwhelming task. You may lose someone near you, like a mentor, a friend, or someone you love. You may feel directionless or doubt everything you thought you knew was true, real and nice. If you feel these things, you have not failed to wake up; know that to your core's depths. You didn't fail; you are on the right track. Keep close tabs on that person for those who know someone very emotionally sensitive that is trying to awaken kundalini. The emotionally vulnerable among us are at great risk because, alone, they go through these times. If they're too dejected and directionless, it can mean their lives, but we can always guard against it. Together we are stronger as a community, and each of us with that backing force will make it through this dark night.

I was in love with the result—the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I was playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all. The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit, the broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling forty pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the summit. The common cultural narratives would tell me that I somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser, that I just didn’t “have it,” that I gave up on my dream and that maybe I let myself succumb to the pressures of society. But the truth is far less interesting than any of these explanations. The truth is, I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story. I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way. Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can bench-press a small house. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it. This is not about willpower or grit. This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.” This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems. See: it’s a never-ending upward spiral. And if you think at any point you’re allowed to stop climbing, I’m afraid you’re missing the point. Because the joy is in the climb itself.

In this regard, the immigrant narrative is perhaps more limited than we would ideally like it to be. While it does urge the immigrant striver to think about the responsibility that comes with succeeding, this obligation is often narrowly focused on family and perhaps compatriots, rather than on changing social and economic structures that lead to the global inequalities that spur immigration in the first place. Many immigrants go abroad to seek economic opportunities so that they can provide financial support to those who stay behind, and the money that immigrants remit is often a vital boost to the livelihood of the developing world. But these financial flows fail to significantly reform the structural factors involved in creating and maintaining global inequality. Consequently, though the scale of remittances can be seen as a sign of how seriously immigrants treat the obligations that stem from their success, from a broader perspective these transfers are insufficient.

Cassian told me only twelve have made it this far,' Nesta murmured to her friends. 'We've already earned the title of Oristian just by being here.' Emerie stirred. 'We could stay up here today, wait it out overnight, and be done at dawn. To hell with any titles.' It was the wise thing to do. The safe thing to do. 'That path,' Nesta said, pointing to a small one along Ramiel's base, 'could also take us down south. No one would go that way, because it takes you away from the mountain.' 'So we'd come all this way and just hide?' Gwyn said, voice hoarse. 'You're hurt,' Nesta countered. 'And that is a mountain in front of us.' 'So rather than try and fail,' Gwyn demanded, 'you would take the safe road?' 'We would live,' Emerie said carefully. 'I'd love nothing more than to wipe the smirks off the lips of the males in my village, but not at this cost. Not if it costs us you, Gwyn. We need you to live.' Gwyn studied Ramiel's craggy, unforgiving slope. Not much snow graced its sides. Like the wind had whipped it all away. Or the storms had avoided its peak entirely. 'Is it living, though? To take the safe road?' 'You're the one who's been in a library for two years,' Emerie said. Gwyn didn't flinch. 'I have. And I am tired of it.' She surveyed the blood-soaked leather along her thigh. 'I don't want to take the safe road.' She pointed to the mountain, to the slender path upward. 'I want to take that road.' Her voice thickened. 'I want to take the road that no one dares travel, and I want to travel it with you two. No matter what may befall us. Not as Illyrians, not for their titles, but as something new. To prove to them, to everyone, that something new and different might triumph over their rules and restrictions.' A cold wind blew off Ramiel's sides. Whispering, murmuring. 'They call this climb the Breaking for a reason,' Emerie countered gravely. Nesta added, 'We haven't eaten in days. We're down to the last of our water. To climb that mountain-' 'I have been broken once before,' Gwyn said, her voice clear. 'I survived it. And I will not be broken again- not even by this mountain.

Now that my corkscrew-curly hair, which grew upward instead of down toward my shoulders, had finally grown long enough to be tied back, I was told that I had to hide it under a headscarf. God would monitor my every move from now on, because I had turned nine, and He would hang me by my hair in hell if I failed to cover it.

Paranoid Systems of History (PSH), a short-lived periodical of the 1920s whose plates have all mysteriously vanished, natch, has even suggested, in more than one editorial, that the whole German Inflation was created deliberately, simply to drive young enthusiasts of the Cybernetic Tradition into Control work: after all, an economy inflating, upward bound as a balloon, its own definition of Earth's surface drifting upward in value, uncontrolled, drifting with the days, the feedback system expected to maintain the value of the mark constant having, humiliatingly, failed. . . . Unity gain around the loop, unity gain, zero change, and hush, that way, forever, these were the secret rhymes of the childhood of the Discipline of Control—secret and terrible, as the scarlet histories say. Diverging oscillations of any kind were nearly the Worst Threat. You could not pump the swings of these playgrounds higher than a certain angle from the vertical.

He dragged his horse into the rider’s wake—the Liosan was pulling up. A mistake. Yedan caught up to him and flung himself on to the man’s back, dragging him from the saddle. There was a satisfying snap of a bone as the Watch landed atop the warrior. He brought his good hand up and round to the Liosan’s face, thumb digging into one eye socket and fingers closing like talons on the upper lip and nose. He jammed his wounded arm with its loosened vambrace into the man’s mouth, forcing open the jaws. Hands tore at him, but feebly, as Yedan forced his thumb deeper, in as far as it could go, then angled it upwards—but he failed to reach the brain. He got on to his knees, lifting the Liosan’s head by hooking his embedded thumb under the ridge of the brow. And then he forced it round, twisting even as he pressed down with his bloodied, armoured arm jammed across the man’s mouth. Joints popped, the jaw swung loose, and then, as the Liosan’s body thrashed in a frenzy, the vertebrae parted and the warrior went limp beneath him.

For our family and others like us, separation is an expression of love. Not just in the physical sense, but in the way we think. We want our children to have an education and a job, to experience life in the way we never could, knowing that everything they gain will make them more distant from us. Loving someone means separating yourself from them. The future is lived vicariously through their achievements: their lives must follow an upward trajectory. They must not fail. That is what social mobility means in Asia today.

For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

Some assholes just fail upward

Some who were considered geniuses failed that way, streaking upwards until they ran into hardship and promptly crashing.

Faced, for example, with a difficult problem to solve—“Will this stock keep going up?”—many investors consult a chart of recent price performance. If the trend line slopes upward, then they immediately answer “Yes,” without realizing that their reflexive system has tricked them into answering an entirely different question. All the chart really shows is the answer to a much easier problem: “Has this stock been going up?” People in this kind of situation “are not confused about the question they are trying to answer,” says Kahneman. “They simply fail to notice that they are answering a different one.

Bed,” Selene ordered the moment I stepped into the room. “What?” “You smell needy.” My historical trend of failing upward appeared to be continuing. “I am. Super needy. Let’s go.

I follow his gaze and my eyes land on a woman in a long emerald-green dress. Black embroidered decorations accentuate the neckline and her tiny waist, and then flow along the edges of a high slit, revealing one slender leg. My eyes trail the slit upward until they stop at her face, and I almost fail to recognize her. She’s removed the nose ring. Her hair is different as well and is pulled up on the top of her head in some complicated design. I can hardly believe this is the same woman I met a few days earlier. The men at the table are mumbling between each other, and I wish they would shut up so I can enjoy the view in peace.

Love Hurts. I daresay there’s two or three poems, six novels and at least twelve songs on the subject. That’s how the Janus-faced beast of poetry gets written in the first place, in all its myriad of magical forms. So; why cover this hitherto uncharted and highly original territory? Why leap fearlessly into the unknown, nostrils flared, eyes flashing fire? Well, in the name of love, lust and limerence, why on earth not? Suffering is gratuitous and pointless, yet also vital, valuable and necessary. My last tête à tête gave me plenty, incorporating elements of the forbidden, of rebellion, pornography, pregnancy, parental approval – followed by fury – of infidelity, friend estrangement, life on one island that was heavenly and a second that veered between purgatorial and infernal, of violence, miscarriage, masturbating Indians, pepper spray, antipathy, disloyalty, evictions, a planned future, failed globetrotting and habitual lies, whilst being indicative of a wider, all-encompassing social corrosion, and while the story itself may remain merely hinted at or alluded to in the course of this generalised polemic, it’s as worthy or valid as any other such tale told round the campfire and whispered across the beaches of the world. All life’s a roll of the dice, tiger; ride into the bastard storm and if your wounds hurt, be grateful you survived to lick them, even in the darkest nights of the soul when the sun is a mattress fire the god of your love died in. Love Hurts, and in a stupendous and savage cosmos, it’s my right to sit at the keyboard and bleed. Besides, love, poverty and war are the necessary accoutrements to a fulfilled life; this is the all-encompassing theme of our human condition and the crooning, persuasive symphony of that philosophically unfathomable miracle of life itself… especially as love leads to poverty and war. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, after all. I certainly am… we choose our own chains... ~excerpt, "Love Hurts

that White people could be persuaded away from their racist ideas if they saw Black people improving their behavior, uplifting themselves from their low station in American society. The burden of race relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of Black Americans. Positive Black behavior, abolitionist strategists held, undermined racist ideas, and negative Black behavior confirmed them. Uplift suasion was not conceived by the abolitionists meeting in Philadelphia in 1794. It lurked behind the craze to exhibit Phillis Wheatley and Francis Williams and other “extraordinary” Black people. So the American Convention, raising the stakes, asked every free Black person to serve as a Black exhibit. In every state, abolitionists publicly and privately drilled this theory into the minds of African people as they entered the ranks of freedom in the 1790s and beyond. This strategy to undermine racist ideas was actually based on a racist idea: “negative” Black behavior, said that idea, was partially or totally responsible for the existence and persistence of racist ideas. To believe that the negative ways of Black people were responsible for racist ideas was to believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority. To believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority was to hold racist ideas. From the beginning, uplift suasion was not only racist, it was also impossible for Blacks to execute. Free Blacks were unable to always display positive characteristics for the same reasons poor immigrants and rich planters were unable to do so: free Blacks were human and humanly flawed. Uplift suasion assumed, moreover, that racist ideas were sensible and could be undone by appealing to sensibilities. But the common political desire to justify racial inequities produced racist ideas, not logic. Uplift suasion also failed to account for the widespread belief in the extraordinary Negro, which had dominated assimilationist and abolitionist thinking in America for a century. Upwardly mobile Blacks were regularly cast aside as unique and as different from ordinary, inferior Black people.

To illustrate this relation, think of a game of table tennis. As the ball hits the table, it will bounce up and down. When we restrain the upward bounce by holding the paddle parallel to the table at a small height, the ball will bounce up and down at a faster rate between paddle and table. If the paddle, the table, and the ball were perfectly elastic, the ball would not lose any energy in the process. The closer to the table we hold the paddle, the more precisely we fix the location of the ball-but at the expense of having it move faster and faster. If we removed both paddle and table in one instant, we would not be able to predict the direction in which the ball moves-up or down. We simply don't know in which direction the very rapidly bouncing ball was moving at the very instant of removal. Consequently, we might say that this process just prior to the removal of table and paddle fixes the location while failing to give us any good information on the velocity; it makes the velocity uncertain. What distinguishes this macroscopic process from the quantum mechanical uncertainty relation is that in principle we can calculate the velocity of the ball at every instant from the initial conditions (how the bounce started) and the boundary conditions (the relative positions of table and paddle). In principle, macroscopic motion is free of uncertainties.

Failing once in awhile is inevitable. The question is which way are we falling most of the time. Are we falling Backward or Forward, Downward or Forward?

Nobody has failed upward as consistently and spectacularly as the ostensible leader of the shrinking free world.

From an early age I helped my mother clean them. We used a special cloth provided by the government, which could not be used for cleaning anything else. Even as a toddler I knew that the portraits were not like other household items. Once, when I pointed a finger at them, my mother scolded me loudly. ‘Never do that.’ Pointing, I learned, was extremely rude. If we needed to gesture towards them, we did so with the palm of the hand facing upward, with respect. ‘Like this,’ she said, showing me. They had to be the highest objects in the room and perfectly aligned. No other pictures or clutter were permitted on the same wall. Public buildings, and the homes of high-ranking cadres of the Party, were obliged to display a third portrait – of Kim Jong-suk, a heroine of the anti-Japanese resistance who died young. She was the first wife of Kim Il-sung and the sainted mother of Kim Jong-il. I thought she was very beautiful. This holy trinity we called the Three Generals of Mount Paektu. About once a month officials wearing white gloves entered every house in the block to inspect the portraits. If they reported a household for failing to clean them – we once saw them shine a flashlight at an angle to see if they could discern a single mote of dust on the glass – the family would be punished.

In Donald’s mind, he has accomplished everything on his own merits, cheating notwithstanding. How many interviews has he given in which he offers the obvious falsehood that his father loaned him a mere million dollars that he had to pay back but he was otherwise solely responsible for his success? It’s easy to understand why he would believe this. Nobody has failed upward as consistently and spectacularly as the ostensible leader of the shrinking free world.

they reached as far upmarket as they could in each new product generation, until their drives packed the capacity to appeal to the value networks above them. It is this upward mobility that makes disruptive technologies so dangerous to established firms—and so attractive to entrants.

Man is the first product of evolution to be capable of controlling evolutionary destiny.'" Endowed as he is with reasoning powers, he must independently decide up on his own behavior, without the compelling guidance by instinct. Supplied with mind, he is expected to cooperate consciously with nature in her further evolutionary program. Unfortunately humanity has arrantly failed to make a serious effort to promote its own further progress. Instead of using the power of the mind to understand the responsibilities which freedom from blind obedience to instinct entails, mankind has refused to listen whenever it was reminded of the requirements of the evolutionary law. It was so much easier to lend an ear to the promptings of desire, which was an unknown element up to the human stage. It must have been very soon after the acquisition of mental self-consciousness and his becoming aware of stirrings of primitive impulses, that man began to use the mind to stimulate the desires of the body. In this way he has indulged the almost negligible sexual impulse which he inherited from the animal kingdom, until it has become a desire so strong that he has difficulty to control it. Overstimulated by this unnaturally strong desire of his own making, man has looked for arbitrary ways in which to gratify it. Although reducing actual reproduction, he has discovered ways of unreproductive sexual action. But every such act, whatever form it takes, is a misuse of sex and uses up some of the life force that should be utilized for the support and the development of higher faculties. "The record of our race progress clearly shows how our upward movement has been checked ... by that misuse.

How many interviews has he given in which he offers the obvious falsehood that his father loaned him a mere million dollars that he had to pay back but he was otherwise solely responsible for his success? It’s easy to understand why he would believe this. Nobody has failed upward as consistently and spectacularly as the ostensible leader of the shrinking free world.

Your potential to create wealth is found between your education on how to make money, and your willingness to live in poverty. By education on how to make money, I am referring here to the many skills you need to acquire for a job, in communication, but also organizational and ethical skills. By willingness to live in poverty, I am referring here to the sacrifices you are willing to make. You see, people fear poverty as if they could avoid it, but the one who escapes it faster, is the one who embraces it better. This means spending as less as possible in your habits, not worrying about what others think of you, and committing yourself to become a servant, even a slave, to your higher self. The reason why so many people struggle to accumulate wealth, is because they are avoiding both of these things just mentioned. They don't want to work, for themselves or others, they aren't willing to make sacrifices, they care a lot about what others think of them, they don't want to save any money, they spend without any sense of responsibility, and they also have no interest in investing on their education, either through formal means or by reading books. Most people don't read, they are waiting for the world to offer them the solutions they want, and the trust luck and shortcuts more than they trust their own capacity to achieve things with their own efforts. That's why they can't get to where they want in life. What I just said, can be applied to any other area of life. Even a good marriage requires education on how to make it work and sacrifices to make it work, and just as much as a dog will require you to sacrifice your time and learn better ways of communicating with him. Your own existence depends on a balance of an education on opportunities and a commitment to find them. So what is the most imbecile thing anyone can tell you? The most dumb persons you will ever find, are those who tell you the exact opposite of what I just said, and in doing so, separate everything in different categories. They will say that happiness doesn't require wealth, or that wealthy individuals are miserable. They will say that love requires luck, or that education isn't necessary to become successful. And you have quite a bunch of idiots in this world, marketing their foolish views on others, as if they were absolute truth. You tend to buy into such views with the love and attachment you feel for them. Thus, be wary of the merchants of incompetence. They will try to sell you the most stupid ideas about life. And if you trust them, you will fail, and keep on failing, until you realize you trusted the wrong people. If you think education is expensive, know that stupidity is a lot more. It can cost you an entire existence in the dark. The path to enlightenment is a path of integration, while the distance is measured in segregations. Stupidity is found in the relativity of everything. The dumber one is, the more he or she will think in terms of differentiations. The wiser one is, the more he or she will focus on the similarities and correlations, because enlightenment is found in an upward route towards oneness.

No Pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do your journey for you. If you try to skip the first journey, you will never see its real necessity and also its limitations; you will never know why this first container must fail you, the wonderful fullness of the second half of the journey, and the relationship between the two. Such is the unreality of many people who “never grow up” or who remain narcissistic into their old age. I am afraid this is not a small number of people in our world today.

This brings me to my system. I still have the diary I wrote when I graduated from Hartwick, in which I outlined my entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn’t want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit. And I didn’t want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I didn’t want to do any sort of custom work, such as building homes, because each one requires the same amount of work. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.

This is another paradox of our era: as native-born people find themselves surrounded by foreign-born people, they become less likely to explore our own country or the world. They become homebodies. The proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit, and the trend continues to creep upward.

As I came around a bend, I saw a beech tree with fungi stacked like a ladder climbing upward along its south side. I stopped to inspect the tree, finding that it was diseased and littered with woodpecker holes. I wondered how I had failed to notice this sight before. I walked a few feet past the tree and turned around. Everything was identical, yet vastly different. The tree, from this perspective, looked healthy and unscathed. Had I seen the tree only from this angle, I would have thought that it was a prime specimen that would grow and flourish for many more years. When I saw the tree from the other side, though, I knew that no matter how full its leaves, the tree was doomed to death and decay. In the darkness of the preceding night, I had walked by the tree without seeing it at all. Yet even in the light of day, what I saw depended on my vantage point. I resumed my hike, thinking about how one’s perspective shapes what one sees. Because the ground was wet and muddy, I spent most of my time looking down, hardly noticing the limbs towering above me. On three hikes around this lake I had seen vastly different things, and had failed to see many things altogether. What I saw was dependent on my perspective, but my assumptions and experiences also shaped my perception.

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

Managing the Neutral Zone: A Checklist Yes No   ___ ___ Have I done my best to normalize the neutral zone by explaining it as an uncomfortable time that (with careful attention) can be turned to everyone’s advantage? ___ ___ Have I redefined the neutral zone by choosing a new and more affirmative metaphor with which to describe it? ___ ___ Have I reinforced that metaphor with training programs, policy changes, and financial rewards for people to keep doing their jobs during the neutral zone? ___ ___ Am I protecting people adequately from inessential further changes? ___ ___ If I can’t protect them, am I clustering those changes meaningfully? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary policies and procedures that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I created the temporary roles, reporting relationships, and organizational groupings that we need to get us through the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I set short-range goals and checkpoints? ___ ___ Have I set realistic output objectives? ___ ___ Have I found the special training programs we need to deal successfully with the neutral zone? ___ ___ Have I found ways to keep people feeling that they still belong to the organization and are valued by our part of it? And have I taken care that perks and other forms of “privilege” are not undermining the solidarity of the group? ___ ___ Have I set up one or more Transition Monitoring Teams to keep realistic feedback flowing upward during the time in the neutral zone? ___ ___ Are my people willing to experiment and take risks in intelligently conceived ventures—or are we punishing all failures? ___ ___ Have I stepped back and taken stock of how things are being done in my part of the organization? (This is worth doing both for its own sake and as a visible model for others’ similar efforts.) ___ ___ Have I provided others with opportunities to do the same thing? Have I provided them with the resources—facilitators, survey instruments, and so on—that will help them do that? ___ ___ Have I seen to it that people build their skills in creative thinking and innovation? ___ ___ Have I encouraged experimentation and seen to it that people are not punished for failing in intelligent efforts that do not pan out? ___ ___ Have I worked to transform the losses of our organization into opportunities to try doing things a new way? ___ ___ Have I set an example by brainstorming many answers to old problems—the ones that people say we just have to live with? Am I encouraging others to do the same? ___ ___ Am I regularly checking to see that I am not pushing for certainty and closure when it would be more conducive to creativity to live a little longer with uncertainty and questions? ___ ___ Am I using my time in the neutral zone as an opportunity to replace bucket brigades with integrated systems throughout the organization?

Fear the people, then, Excellency. They consider John a prophet." Salome now tilted her head upward and stared directly into the eyes of Antipas in an unmistakeably challenging expression. Her mien spoke eloquently what remained unspoken: "I dare you to break your word, Tetrarch Herod Antipas, in front of all your guests." Pilate, at the outer edge of that stare, caught the smirk of success spelled out by Salome's limpid blue eyes and firmly pressing, perfect lips. But he did not intervene. He had overheard Chuza's advice to Antipas, and it was obviously correct. Only a fool would fail to heed it, and the Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea was no fool. But Pilate was a Roman, a practical man who could temper absolutes to suit circumstances, as Rome herself had been doing for the last seven hundred years. Here in the East, however, absolutes were not so easily adjusted, and the spoken word was thought to have a power all its own.

Most of this collection is about how to be a funny dangerous failure. And we all fail homies, it's okay. We just have to learn how to fail upward.

A fox crept up to a vine. He gazed longingly at the fat, purple, overripe grapes. He placed his front paws against the trunk of the vine, stretched his neck and tried to get at the fruit, but it was too high. Irritated, he tried his luck again. He launched himself upward, but his jaw snapped only at fresh air. A third time he leapt with all his might – so powerfully that he landed back down on the ground with a thud. Still not a single leaf had stirred. The fox turned up his nose: ‘These aren’t even ripe yet. Why would I want sour grapes?’ Holding his head high, he strode back into the forest. The Greek poet, Aesop, created this fable to illustrate one of the most common errors in reasoning. An inconsistency arose when the fox set out to do something and failed to accomplish it. He can resolve this conflict in one of three ways: A) by somehow getting at the grapes, B) by admitting that his skills are insufficient, or C) by retrospectively reinterpreting what happened. The last option is an example of cognitive dissonance, or rather, its resolution.

59. Creature Comforts Are Only Temporary It was one of the most painful lessons of my life. It was during the first time I attempted SAS selection. I was totally lost in a vast boggy wetland, torrential rain was driving down, and I was utterly spent. I was also way behind time, and I knew it. When I finally made it to the penultimate checkpoint, the corporals kept me there doing endless press-ups in the wet marsh with my heavy pack still on my back. I knew this was costing me even more valuable time and energy. I was feeling fainter and fainter; I knew things were bad. I was soon off again, wading across a fast-flowing, waist-deep stream, before climbing up through knee-deep mud towards the next 2,000-foot (600-metre) mountain ridge-line. I just had to keep going. Ten miles. Twenty miles. ‘Nothing good comes from quitting,’ I told myself, over and over again. ‘If I keep going, I will pass.’ But I was getting more and more delirious with fatigue. I didn’t know why this was happening, and I couldn’t control it. Maybe I hadn’t eaten or drunk enough, or perhaps it was just that the months of this relentless pace were finally taking their toll and I was at my limit. Every couple of paces, my knees would buckle. If I stumbled, I couldn’t stop myself from falling. Eventually I saw the trucks in the distance below me, symbolizing the end point. Wisps of smoke from army Hexi stoves curled upwards from the woods. Soon I would be warm, soon I would have a cup of hot tea. It was all I wanted. But when I reached the end checkpoint I was told I had been failed - I had been too slow. My world fell inwards. I was sent off to make camp in the woods and rest for the night. The remaining recruits would be heading out for the night march in a few hours. The next morning I would be returned to camp with the others who hadn’t made the grade. I was totally dejected. That night in those woods, warm and dry under my shelter, blisters attended to, dry socks on, and out of the wind and rain, I learnt an enduring lesson: warm and dry doesn’t mean fulfilled and happy.

An English traveler, James H. Juke, was aghast that a day’s sail could take him from a well-fed nation to an island of the wretched and dying. He saw Irish trying to exist on sand eels, turnip tops and seaweed—“a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal which he kept.” The potato blight had not spared England, nor Holland, parts of France and Germany. Their crops also failed. But only in Ireland were people dying en masse. The cause had been planted in the land—not the potato, but English rule that had driven a majority of Irish from ground their ancestors had owned. “The terrifying exactitude of memory,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. Famines had come before, epochs of hunger that killed upwards of 70,000 in the worst case. But this starvation reached across the island—it was now the Great Hunger, an Gorta Mór, with a fatal toll ten times that of the Great Plague of London in 1665. And here was the tragedy: there was plenty of food in Ireland while the people starved. Irish rains produced a prodigious amount of Irish grains. Almost three fourths of the country’s cultivable land was in corn, wheat, oats and barley. The food came from Irish land and Irish labor. But it didn’t go into Irish mouths. About 1.5 billion pounds of grain and other foodstuffs were exported. The natives were hired hands and witnesses to these money crops, grown by Anglo landlords. Same with cattle, sheep and hogs raised within eyesight of the hollow-bellied. Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.

It’s time for another aside: If you look at the last two tables—those showing big losses in 2008 and big gains in 2009—it’s easy to conclude that the two years together were something of a non-event. For example, if you put $100 into the Credit Suisse Leveraged Loan Index on the first day of 2008, you would have lost 29% over the course of the year and had only $71 left at the end. But then you would have gained 45% in 2009 and ended up with $103 at the conclusion of the two-year period, for a net gain of $3. The two-year results in the asset classes listed above ranged from moderate net losses to moderate net gains. It matters enormously, however, what you did in between. Yes, holding on would have enabled you to recoup most or all of your losses and end up well, with results as described above. But if you lost your nerve and sold at the trough—or if, having bought with borrowed money, you received a margin call you couldn’t meet and saw your positions sold out from under you—you experienced the decline but not the recovery, and your net result in this “non-event” two-year period was disastrous. For this reason, it’s important to note that exiting the market after a decline—and thus failing to participate in a cyclical rebound—is truly the cardinal sin in investing. Experiencing a mark-to-market loss in the downward phase of a cycle isn’t fatal in and of itself, as long as you hold through the beneficial upward part as well. It’s converting that downward fluctuation into a permanent loss by selling out at the bottom that’s really terrible. Thus understanding cycles and having the emotional and financial wherewithal needed to live through them are essential ingredients in investment success.

He had heard the saying floating around the government, “failing upwards.” Because it was nearly impossible to fire a government civilian, most organizations would promote the poor performers out of their organization. This would get rid of the person and made them someone else’s problem. Unfortunately, this often meant that the worst government employees ended up becoming some of the most senior leaders in the government civilian ranks.

Chapter 20 There's One More Inning I don't know what "inning" of life you are in, but the odds are you have at least one more opportunity to come to the plate. Are you running against the wind? Is a storm about to swamp your boat? Have you failed in the past? Do you believe God has given up on you? I don't believe he has! In Philippians 3:12-14 Paul reflects the attitude I believe we ought to have: Philippians 3:12-14 (NASB) Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus. 13 Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Falling, losing, failing, transgression, and sin are the pattern, I am sorry to report. Yet, they all lead toward home.