being quiet
today was a no-blog, no-calls, no-conversation kind of day...sometimes it is good to be quiet. spent much time reading today, for my own replenishment...wished i could go out onto a nice grassy hill somewhere and read on a blanket in the sun...but there wasn't so much sun, rather chilly in fact, and the green was still damp from yesterday's drizzle---
"In the experimental sphere I said to myself, 'Everything develops, differentiates, moving towards complexity and refinement and there are laws governing this progress. You are a part of a whole. When you know as much as possibble about the whole, and about the laws of its development, you will understand your place in the whole, and your own self.' Although I am ashamed to admit it, there was a time when I seemed to be satidfied with this. It was a time when I myself was developing and growing more complex. My muscles were growing and strengthening, my memory was richer, my capacity to think and comprehend was increasing. I was growing and developing, and, feeling this growth within myself, it was natural for me to believe that there was a law governing the world, in which I could find the answers to the questions of my life. But the time came when I stopped growing; I felt that I was no longer developing but was drying up, my muscles were growing weaker, my teeth falling out, and I saw that this law not only failed to explain anything to me, but then that there had never been and never could be such a law, and that I had taken for a law something which I had discovered in myself at a certain time of my life. I examined its definition more strictly, and it became clear to me that there could be no law of perpetual development. It became apparent to me that to say that in the infinity of time and space everything is developing, becoming more perfect, complex and differentiated, is really to say nothing at all. They are all words without a meaning, for in the infinite there is no simple and complex, no before and after, and no better or worse."
- leo tolstoy, "a confession"