Peace Finder

Situation

When I feel I am running out of time

6 traditions are shelved here, each stating the question in its own words.

Jewish

If not now, when — and is that a rebuke or an opening?

A tradition carried in the Hebrew scriptures and in the rabbinic literature built around them — Mishnah, Talmud, commentary and law — read and argued over continuously for more than two thousand years. Its teaching arrives as much through recorded disagreement between named teachers as through statement, and its texts are read as scripture by their communities.

About this passagePirke Avot is a tractate of the Mishnah, and unusually among them it holds no law — only sayings, each attributed to a named teacher, arranged as a chain of transmission. Hillel taught in Jerusalem in the generation before the destruction of the Second Temple. Three questions, each undercutting the answer the last one invites: nobody else will do this for you; doing it only for yourself makes you nothing much; and the deliberation itself can be the delay.

He used to say, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I care for myself only, what am I? And if not now, when?"

In plainer words

If I do not look after myself, nobody is going to. But if looking after myself is all I do, what exactly am I? And if I keep putting it off — when?

A restatement in modern English, written for this collection. The passage above is the text; this is one way of putting it.

Pirke Avot: The Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, translated by Joseph I. Gorfinkle, Library of Jewish Classics III. Public domain.

Filed undertimetrustjudgementfuture

Taoist

What am I spending my life to keep?

A tradition originating in China and gathered around the Tao Teh King and the writings attributed to Zhuangzi, with a later history of monastic practice, ritual and internal alchemy. Its central term, the Tao, names the way things go of themselves; much of its counsel concerns acting without forcing, and the strength of what is yielding.

About this passageThree questions and a conclusion, set by Legge in verse where the Chinese is rhymed and compressed. The questions are about price: what a reputation costs, what a hoard costs, and which of keeping or losing them brings more grief. The last lines name two stopping conditions — being content, and knowing where to stop — and claim both as forms of safety rather than restraint.

Or fame or life, Which do you hold more dear? Or life or wealth, To which would you adhere? Keep life and lose those other things; Keep them and lose your life:—which brings Sorrow and pain more near?

Thus we may see, Who cleaves to fame Rejects what is more great; Who loves large stores Gives up the richer state.

Who is content Needs fear no shame. Who knows to stop Incurs no blame. From danger free Long live shall he.

In plainer words

Which do you care about more, your name or your life? Your life or your money? And which hurts more — keeping the things and losing the life, or losing the things and keeping it? Look at it and you see that the one who clings to a reputation is turning down something bigger, and the one who piles up possessions is giving up a richer state than the pile. Whoever has enough is not going to be humiliated. Whoever knows where to stop does not get blamed. They are the ones who last.

A restatement in modern English, written for this collection. The passage above is the text; this is one way of putting it.

Christian

How much of this time was ever mine to spend?

A tradition rooted in the Hebrew scriptures and in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, carried through two millennia of churches, commentaries, liturgies and practices. Its texts are read as scripture by their communities.

About this passageFrom a book whose speaker, Qoheleth, spends most of its length reporting that he has tried wisdom, pleasure, work and wealth and found each of them insubstantial. This passage is the best known part of it. It is a list rather than an instruction: fourteen pairs, each holding a thing and its opposite, with no ranking between them and no advice about which to choose.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.

In plainer words

Everything gets its turn. Being born and dying. Planting and pulling up. Killing and healing. Tearing down and building. Crying and laughing. Mourning and dancing. Throwing stones away and gathering them. Holding someone and not. Searching and giving up the search. Keeping and throwing out. Ripping and mending. Saying nothing and saying it. Loving and hating. War and peace. The list does not tell you which one you are in. It says only that there is a season for it, and that the season is not the whole year.

A restatement in modern English, written for this collection. The passage above is the text; this is one way of putting it.

About this passageTold to a crowd, immediately after someone in it asks Jesus to settle an inheritance dispute with his brother. The gospel introduces it as a parable in its own words. The man in it has done nothing wrong by the standards of his trade — a good harvest, more storage, a plan for the years ahead.

He spoke a parable to them, saying, “The ground of a certain rich man produced abundantly. He reasoned within himself, saying, ‘What will I do, because I don’t have room to store my crops?’

He said, ‘This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns, build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. I will tell my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” ’

“But God said to him, ‘You foolish one, tonight your soul is required of you. The things which you have prepared—whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”

In plainer words

A farmer has a harvest so good he has nowhere to put it, so he decides to pull down his barns and build bigger ones, and then to take it easy for years. That night he dies, and the story asks whose the grain is now. The charge against him is not wealth and it is not planning. It is that he counted on time he had not been given.

A restatement in modern English, written for this collection. The passage above is the text; this is one way of putting it.

The Holy Bible, World English Bible. Public domain. The WEB is a revision of the American Standard Version of 1901.

Filed undertimefutureimpermanence

Stoic

Is there too little time, or too little kept for myself?

A school of Greek and Roman philosophy taught from the third century BCE onward, concerned with judgement, action and the distinction between what a person controls and what they do not. Its surviving handbooks were written as practical training rather than theory.

About this passageAddressed to Paulinus, who managed Rome's grain supply. Seneca opens by reporting the common complaint — that nature gave us too little time — and then refuses it. The list that follows is of ways people spend a life without noticing, and it is worth saying that Seneca was among the wealthiest men in Rome and held office under Nero; readers have argued since antiquity about how the argument sits with the life.

The greater part of mankind, my Paulinus, complains of the unkindness of Nature, because we are born only for a short space of time, and that this allotted period of life runs away so swiftly, nay so hurriedly, that with but few exceptions men's life comes to an end just as they are preparing to enjoy it: nor is it only the common herd and the ignorant vulgar who mourn over this universal misfortune, as they consider it to be: this reflection has wrung complaints even from great men. Hence comes that well-known saying of physicians, that art is long but life is short.

Why do we complain of Nature? she has dealt kindly with us. Life is long enough, if you know how to use it. One man is possessed by an avarice which nothing can satisfy, another by a laborious diligence in doing what is totally useless: another is sodden by wine: another is benumbed by sloth: one man is exhausted by an ambition which makes him court the good will of others.

In plainer words

Most people complain that nature was stingy: we get so little time, and it goes so fast that most of us are only just ready to enjoy life when it ends. Even great men have said so — hence the doctors' line that art is long and life is short. But why blame nature? She was generous. Life is long enough, if you know how to spend it. The trouble is what we spend it on. Greed that is never satisfied. Enormous effort poured into something pointless. Drink. Idleness. Ambition that leaves you courting other people's approval.

A restatement in modern English, written for this collection. The passage above is the text; this is one way of putting it.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Dialogues, translated by Aubrey Stewart, 1900. Public domain. Text from the Standard Ebooks edition, whose editorial contributions are released under CC0.

Filed undertimeattentionrestjudgement

Research

What do years of it actually produce?

Findings from published psychological and neuroscientific work, summarised for this collection rather than reproduced, with the study named on each entry so a reader can go to the source. What is collected here is what has been measured about attention, habit, sleep, emotion and change — including, where it applies, how large the measured effect is and how well it has held up when other groups have tried to repeat it.

About this passageSummarised for this collection from the London taxi driver studies, which are the most cited demonstration that an adult brain changes structurally with sustained practice. The 2011 study is the one that matters most, because it followed trainees over time rather than comparing drivers with non-drivers — which is what rules out the possibility that people with larger hippocampi simply become taxi drivers.

London taxi drivers spend three or four years learning the city's layout well enough to pass an examination called the Knowledge. When researchers scanned them, the rear part of the hippocampus — a structure involved in spatial memory — was measurably larger than in people who had not done it.

That first result had an obvious weakness: perhaps people with that kind of brain are drawn to that kind of job. So a later study followed trainees from before they started. Those who qualified showed the structural change. Those who trained and did not qualify, and those who never trained, did not. The change followed the practice.

Two things worth keeping in proportion. This was years of daily effort, not a technique applied for a fortnight, and the change was specific to what was practised rather than a general improvement — on some other memory tasks the qualified drivers did slightly worse.

What the finding supports is narrow and still considerable: an adult brain is not finished. What you do repeatedly, over a long time, shows up in the tissue.

Summarised for this collection. The findings belong to the researchers named on each entry; the wording is ours, and any error in it is ours too.

The workMaguire, E. A. et al. (2000), “Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers”, PNAS 97(8); and Woollett, K. & Maguire, E. A. (2011), “Acquiring ‘the Knowledge’ of London's layout drives structural brain change”, Current Biology 21(24).· summary not yet checked against the paper

Filed underpatiencetimehopeattention

Astrology

What if beginning is only one of the three jobs?

A practice of reading meaning from the positions of the sun, moon and planets, attested in Babylonian, Hellenistic, Indian and Chinese forms and continuous in the West since antiquity. Western astrology divides the year into twelve signs and reads the movement of the planets as a description of timing, season and disposition.

About this passageWritten for this collection, describing how the Western astrological tradition divides the zodiac by mode. It sets out what practitioners say. Whether the sky describes anything is not a question this note takes a position on.

The twelve signs are sorted three ways, and the one people meet last is mode. Four signs begin a season — Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn — and the tradition calls them cardinal. Four hold the season at its full width. Four dissolve it so the next can start.

What the scheme insists on is that beginning is only one of the three jobs. A year that was all cardinal would be all January: a great deal of starting and nothing brought to term. The tradition treats the holding and the dissolving as work of the same rank, which is not how most calendars are sold.

Read that way, a season of no visible progress is not a failure of the season. It is what the middle of anything looks like from inside it.

Astrologers reading a chart heavy in one mode do not describe it as better or worse. They describe what it will find easy and what it will have to be taught.

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