19 Jul 08 Fortune Cookies

I’ve occasionally been coming up with maxims. The world’s far too overstuffed with them, but I’d like to keep them handy and collected — maybe to pass them on to a son or daughter, someday. (Some of these obviously wouldn’t be passed along at age eight, and there’s one I don’t think I’d pass along quite as explicitly.)

When in the middle of an argument, develop the ability to step outside of yourself, and outside the heat, and ask what the overall purpose is: whether it does any good to you or anyone else. Let the argument serve you, not you serve the argument.

It’s tempting to think that events done in teenage years have no consequence. It can be more and more difficult to change your course as you go grow older. You have more opportunities when you’re young. Not that your life is over when you’re older, but there’s more opportunities when you’re young. It’s like trying to alter a building after the foundation has been laid.

There is a tendency to think and there is a discontinuity between who you are as a child, who you are as a teenager, who you are as a young adult, who you are as an adult, who you are as a parent, who you are as a husband or a wife. There isn’t. You are you. You’re a unified person and there is no discontinuity. It’s one being playing different roles. But who you are at 8 is who you are at 30. There’s no different person who comes over and takes control of your body.

You are never as flawed as you think you are.

There is a higher purpose than just the zinger.

The mind is a computer full of background processes other people have installed.

You know far less about yourself than you think you do — most of your certainties aren’t.

♂: Give equal attention to the book, the body, and the breast.
♀: Give equal attention to the pencil, the physique, and the penis.

You will never inhabit the skin of the Other, so let your words be the advice of a well-meaning friend, not the command of a parent to a child. And since you will never inhabit the skin of God, do not presume to know that you are right and the Other is wrong.

Learn to take comfort from the small stuff, because it surrounds you everyday in abundance and it can replenish you when the big stuff is few and far between.

Know when what you speak is fact and what you speak is opinion.

Realize that so much of what your reality is is a mental construct. Ask a colorblind man the color of the sky. Ask a woman with bad proprioception about gravity.