#scientificphilosopher

[scientificphilosopher]

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[scientificphilosopher]

For some, the thought that we’re made up of ‘merely’ matter is distressing. For me, reflecting on this fact—that we are all composed of elements forged in the hearts of dying stars—sustains in me a sense of wonder and awe. How about you?

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[scientificphilosopher]

Bringing my thesis research to my office. Stuff's getting real now. Hopefully by the end of it I'll have an answer to the meaning of life 😉

[scientificphilosopher]

Our culture is obsessed with happiness. There is a never ending stream of self-help books out there that promise to reveal to us the secret of happiness. The secret about this secret, however, is that there is no secret. Life isn’t about happiness. It’s about living meaningful, purposeful, fulfilling lives, which often requires of us pain and suffering and sacrifice. This isn’t fun. It’s messy. It’s ugly. It’s really damn hard. And we’re certainly not feeling sensations of happiness and pleasure as we go through it. But learning how to navigate and even embrace these inevitable moments of darkness is needed for us to live well and to flourish.

Nietzsche said that ‘To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished.’ Dolly Parton summed it up with a bit more merriment: ‘Everybody wants happiness, nobody wants pain; but there can’t be a rainbow without a little rain.’

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[scientificphilosopher]

[scientificphilosopher]

via: My twiddler

[oofpoetry]

Sit with me and be still. Be as still as you can. Fight the jitters, the thoughts, the jerks. Fight the the flux, the jolts, the itches and aches. And still in your stillness you are torrential, Your body races around earth’s iron nucleus at more than the speed of sound. The ground you stand on and the blue sky above plummets, careens toward our sun, facing a fiery death, saved only by inertia, a stellar waltz at 90,000 feet per second. Faster still, our plasma deity, blazing white, concealing rainbows, forging elements, engendering life, falls toward the darkest of darks, a darkness that eats the darkness, a blackness that sucks us around its invisible teeth 300 times faster than a bullet, itself carving a path through the cosmos at velocities unknowable to us mortals, more than a million miles per hour, speeding, plunging, sinking, circling spinning, spinning, spinning— But still, be still. Close your eyes and look inside, where your cells hurry, busy themselves with life and death, creating and destroying, building and breaking, a microbial universe existing because of you, you existing because of it. Smaller still, particles popping, jiggling, bouncing. Zig-zagging abstractly, attracting, repelling, These tiny wanderers in eternal transit, more atoms in one strand of your hair than humans on earth, all dancing just for you, always on the move, journeying for the journey, your identity emerging from them, you who sits here, still— Be still. Look at me, let the light reflect from your body and embrace the cells in my eyes, send them my way as fast as anything in the universe can travel, and let the information whirl around in my occipital lobe while I revel, let the message engrave itself into my grey matter like lovers engrave their love into the skin of a tree, the photons’ odyssey now forever altered by your presence, interlocked with your existence, You who seems so still, even though you’re not— Be still to see how much you stir.

Nich P.K., “Be Still”

[scientificphilosopher]

via: My twiddler