Morning Pages, Acceptance and Freedom and Something Japanese

August 07, 2006

Came across this quotation ( I have been forever copying quotations ever since when ) I jotted down maybe about twenty years ago , the other day .. and it has a pacifying, affirming and liberating effect on me …This one’s from a certain Arthur Gordon and I did not jot down the book or article I copied it from … It goes --- “ Apathy fails to distinguish what can and cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action, acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens. “ Echoes the ‘wheat and weeds’ realization and the ‘serenity prayer’ …..

I’m putting the following in my blog , just to have a handy copy of these , for my use, in cyberspace . I took these down from some book I found in the UP School of Economics library when I was doing some post-baccalaureate courses in development economics , of all things, way back in 1988 …. Came across them again (and again) on some aging-yellowing notebook pages in the files/clippings I’ve kept at home these past three decades … This is on Basho -- a Japanese haiku poet ….

“Go to the pine , if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself . Otherwise, you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and object have become one --- when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural -- if the object and yourself are separate --- then your poetry is not true poetry , but merely your subjective counterfeit. “ ---- [ ‘Crude personifaction and ingenious self – dramatization have completely disappeared from his poems’ ]

Reflection : Come to think of it , the same could be applied when learning about something technical like data mining and the SAS Enterprise Miner …. If I even let a
an iota of subjective preoccupation that this thing is difficult to learn and that I don’t have sufficient brain power to learn this thing ….. whatever my subjective opinions and feelings about these data mining things …. I should just study and learn them for themselves ……and not get side-tracked by me ….


Some Basho haikus :


‘Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water
A deep resonance .’

I don’t know Japanese, but here it is in the original language :

‘Furuike ya
Kawazu tobikorou
Tobiko mu ,
Mizu no oto.”

-------------------ooooooo-----------oooooo------------

‘Under the bright moon
I walked round and round
The lake –
All night long ‘ .

‘Build a fire, my friend,
So it will crackle.
I will show you something good,
A big ball of snow ‘

2:25 PM. While continuing my tutorial/torturial in Enterprise Miner , this thought came to mind and I have to jot this down , to lighthen my brain up.
It is this --- that I have been bearing down on myself to some degree because of my innate temperament/personality trait that is basically and for the most part introverted and melancholic , which doesn’t really make for social success which in this society is necessary for some measure of success in one’s career . The dilemma was do I have to turn myself into an unnatural extroverted and sanguine personality to have some degree of social and career success ? Is that what God wanted me to do ? I’m more inclined to think that God has given me the kind of temperament and personality that I naturally have for some reasons, for His own purposes and plans… And I am respecting that …..