Post date: Feb 13, 2020 3:51:13 AM
so i spent most of the weekend, two weeks ago, with a mild fever. along with the requisite body aches, my brain was operating at 60% of its usual capacity. when i looked at some of the sci-fi novels that i borrowed from the library ...
i'd like to, but i can't;
i don't have enough mental energy right now.
so the only memorable things i did were
watching episodes 3 & 4 of "the mandalorian" [1]
reading the first chapter of stony the road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. [2]
watching episodes 1 & 2 of the netflix original series: pandemic (or: how to stop an outbreak).
reading another chapter of "the book" of ichigo ichie.
...
i bring up the last item, with initial apology. on its cover, a book like this doesn't appear much different from kondo's tidying up [3] or all those books about hygge that make you feel like you're not doing it right [4] or how the word namaste got reappropriated by westerner yoga and other popular culture.
as suggested, i haven't yet finished the book, but some thoughts come to mind:
to be fair, this is not a scientific book. on the other hand, when they bring up science, their research is suspect: they parrot the myth, initiated by the popularist malcolm gladwell, that it supposedly takes 10,000 hours to achieve expertise in any one field.
the authors also seem to have a quiet agenda to promote certain Buddhist principles .. not that i have anything against that, but it makes the purpose of the book a little misleading. alternatively, this would make a good gateway book to anyone who is interested in Buddhism, without having to make the commitment of reading a full-fledged book about Buddhism [5].
...
[0] i actually wrote most of this post, a week ago or earlier, but thought that i'd eventually sit down and finish my thoughts. (as you can imagine, those plans never came to fruition, and this is what made it to press.)
[1] the ending to episode 3 is quite something. it reminded me of one of the more memorable scenes involving steve rogers from avengers: endgame.
[2] yes, after that first bit about not having enough mental energy, i see why you're confused. on the other hand, i'm a professional academic, and Gates writes well and he goes easy on you. also: academic reading is what i've done over the last twenty years. sometimes it's just easier to read academ-ese than anything else.
[3] this book gets a bad rap, but the last chapter is slightly redeeming. i'm going out on a limb here, but the author may have taken the perspective of "how" first, with different variations, and eventually, why. it's not unlike how in martial arts, there's a lot of drilling of how to strike before you intuit that "oh, that's why we never did it this other way that i saw in a movie once."
[4] in contrast, in Suomi there is a term called kalsarikanni (or, in more Germanic terminology: pantsdrunk) which literally means: drinking at home in your underpants.
[5] if you are looking for a recommendation, though, then i suggest transforming the mind by the 14th Dalai Lama. it's surprisingly non-dogmatic. also, it's easy to read, because the text was based off a series of lectures given by the Dalai Lama. (suffice it to say that the spoken word often transforms nicely into the written word, when of good quality.)