Don't just live the length of your life - live the width of it as well.
Diane AckermanRead
Complexity excites the mind, and order rewards it. In the garden, one finds both, including vanishingly small orders too complex to spot, and orders so vast the mind struggles to embrace them.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the interplay between complexity and order in our understanding of the world.
Diane Ackerman explores how the mind is stimulated by complexity while it finds satisfaction in order. In nature, such as in a garden, both elements coexist; we encounter intricate details that may elude us as well as grand designs that challenge our comprehension, reflecting the diverse ways in which we engage with life and knowledge.
In practice
In a lecture on systemic thinking, one could use this quote to illustrate how complexity and simplicity are both necessary for understanding systems.
Don't just live the length of your life - live the width of it as well.
We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature - not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we're inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes inside, or some dust.
We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological nature can't completely satisfy that yearning.
Because IQ tests favor memory skills and logic, overlooking artistic creativity, insight, resiliency, emotional reserves, sensory gifts, and life experience, they can't really predict success, let alone satisfaction.
American writer_x000D_ _x000D_ 1803-1882_x000D_ _x000D_ Play is our brain's favorite way of learning.
In rare moments of deep play, we can lay aside our sense of self, shed time's continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute present, watching the world's ordinary miracles. No mind or heart hobbles. No analyzing or explaining. No questing for logic. No promises. No goals. No relationships. No worry. One is completely open to whatever drama may unfold.
Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.
Let the Jews who claim to be the chosen race prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth. Every country is their home, including Palestine, not by aggression but by loving service
Americanism is a question of principle, of idealism, of character. It is not a matter of birthplace, or creed, or line of descent.
For me, disability is a physical experience, but it's also a cultural experience and a social experience, and for me, the word 'crip' is the one that best encapsulated all of that.
I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.
For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.
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