DUALITY

“So let all of your activity be directed at some object, let it have some end in view. It is not industry that makes a man restless, but false impressions of things drive him mad. The outwardly shows of some object which excites them, because their deluded mind cannot detect its worthlessness. This leads men to turn to the most disgraceful of vices, which is eavesdropping and prying into public and secret things.” - SENECA

This is a *small passage from a much larger piece that I meditate on frequently. I bring [On] The shortness of life with me when I travel wherever I go, from Lebanon to New York to Belgrade to the North Sea and what I love is that in this passage where he basically speaks about people dashing about and going on and creating what he calls busy idleness. And if you take it at face value black and white, which is busy idleness leads to disgraceful vices. But in that busy idleness, that, that's something special.

And the reason I continue to read is because what you pick up the first time is not what you will get the second time. And busy idleness, it touches me, because yes, it can lead to vices, but there's also virtues.

I live in the North Sea, and every morning I wake up and I look out at the ocean and I watch the sunrise over the mountains, and just below that, there is a man who is so busy.

He's an old fisherman, and he goes out to his boat, and you see him walking around, and he's smoking, and he's drinking coffee, and he's very busy, he always has something going on about him.

And one day, I asked my good friend, Paul, what does Kurt do? And he said

“Nothing, he's retired.”

And all the while, all of this time, I imagined, I thought, wild stories about this man.He must own a giant fish farm. He's out there hunting tuna in the early mornings. I had the most incredible life for this man and it was busy idleness. And so this passage also enraptures my mind because “Life is in the happenings.”

I just reread Dostoyevsky's White Nights and one of the most beautiful passages is when he talks about the gray faces in St. Petersburg and how they come back to life when spring comes and you can see the same girl in winter with a gray face and you will assume she's on death's door but like a flower she blooms in front of you and rosy cheeks come out and he would only have seen that because there's busy idleness there's people dashing about going about things.

And so when I think about the comings and goings and the vices one can obtain in that, there's also virtue, because you see the unexpected, you watch someone bloom in front of you.

And I think about the duality, finding duality. And since life is in the happenings, perhaps how we view busy idleness. And how we use our time - is a reflection of us, one can be seen and known by their actions.

And so I've been meditating on that a bit.

This thought of the duality of what we see and what it is, is perhaps a reflection of oneself.