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Amish in the mall

You can see whole families walking around in the mall. Father and mother, young, with several children, 4 or 5, all well dressed, mother and girls with long dresses and hair under some kind of net.  The boys are well dressed and with short pants.  All with very rough black shoes. Serious and keep to their own business. Sometimes also you see young women, dressed the same, all and about at some stores.  It is assumed that they belong to the New Young Amish tendency, most probably they arrived at the mall in a car. Not in the traditional buggy with a horse. Some use cell phones and considering their preferences in stores they like the occidental merchandise. A big step in a group that favoured a rural way of life supposed to marry between members of the same church, which resulted in some genetic disorders,  elders not going to nursing homes, are fanatics of family authority. But young members can opt not to join the church, a little bit of freedom here....
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Back to the country

The world is facing two wars at the same time. Enormous efforts are being made to avoid full escalation and reduce civilian casualties. Everybody is immediately, quietly, thinking about their security. Are we safe? In which position is our country? are we in danger of being involved in any conflict soon?  You have to start thinking if these conflicts will be in the future and if there will be no way to escape the horrors of the modern world.  One idea to consider is to change the way we are living and abandon city life, technology, the scientific advancements. Maybe what we should do is simplify, go back to the country and learn to minimize all our needs. This will ensure humankind will continue to populate the earth and not destroy all resources.  But we are not capable, we are used to living with technology, we need all our commodities, and we lost the instinct to work with our hands and satisfy our primary needs.  Can we learn to do that? yes, probably, but w...

Mary Lou's grief

  I only met Mary Lou a few times during the past 2 years. Normally she arrived at 4 pm for a brief visit with Bev (from Beverly) maybe to have supper and then left for the night. Don't know if she has close family members, nieces and nephews, as I never saw anybody else.  Now she is by herself. From one moment to another, with no explanation, as it comes from the will of something else and you are helpless.  How many times she must have thought that a life like the one that Bev had, was very difficult to handle. But she was there telling her her feelings, opinions, hopes, and thoughts. Now this is over. I saw her car yesterday and today. Maybe she reviewed all of Bev's personal belongings, getting surprised or not about the things she was discovering and deciding what to do with all the unnecessary stuff. Learning a lesson on the futility of keeping material things. But is a whole life that we are talking about, you keep collecting things and these make your place your p...

Ten ways to love

 

The unimportance of identity

  Consider the fact that. in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But the reality is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And, in that description, my death seems to disappear. Derek Parfit  Derek Parfit was a British philosopher who specialized in personal identity, rationality and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th century and early 21st century .

A dancing star and purpose

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star  Friedrich Nietzche  Those who are devoid of purpose will make the void their purpose  Friedrich Nietzche 

Existential reflections and the philosophers

  Events happen as they do People behave as they are Embrace what you actually get Epictetus Difficulties strengthen the mind and labor does to the body Seneca If you are ruled by mind you are a king; if by body, a slave Cato the Elder You have power over your own mind -not outside events Realize this and you will find strength Marcus Aurelius No man is good by chance  Virtue is something which must be learned  Seneca They who fear suffering are already suffering from what they fear  Montaigne Another person can not hurt you without cooperation; you are hurt the moment you believe yourself to be Marcus Aurelius

Chaos and order

  Chaos and order are fundamental elements because every lived situation is made of both  Order is not enough. You can't just be stable and secure and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned.  Nonetheless, chaos can be too much you can't tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understand and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering.  You have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved,  that is where meaning is to be found.  From 12 rules 

In studying a philosopher

 In studying a philosopher the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered : that a man with whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have some intelligence, but no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intelligent man expresses a view which seems to us obviously absurd, we should not attempt to prove that it is somehow true, but we should try to understand how it ever came to seem true.  This exercise of historical and psychological imagination at once enlarges the scope of our thinking and he...

How to Grow Old

 How to Grow Old  Marcus Tullius Cicero  1- A good old age begins in youth  2- Old age can be a wonderful part of life  3-There are proper seasons to life  4- Older people have much to teach to the young  5- Old age not deny us an active life but we need to accept limitations  6- The mind is a muscle that must be exercised 7- Older people must stand up for themselves  8-Sex is highly overrated  9- Cultivate your own garden  10-Death is not to be feared  Who was Marcus Tullius Cicero? 106 BC- 43 BC Roman, statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher and academic skeptic  Famous for his orations on politics and society.