Swimming Against the Stream

A few significant reminders showed up in the mailbox this Saturday morning,

Camille Paglia was born today (1947) in Endicott, New York. In 1805, Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark. Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840. And, today in 1917, America joined in what became World War I.

Ideals are ideal. They are projections of cognitive constructs called “ideas,” or more ephemerally “notions.” Projected behaviorally into the “real” world, they are never fully realized, only approximated. At the extreme, say in religious and/or political idealism, they can be deadly. Ideals are like the horizon, a place we can walk toward, a direction we can go in, but not a place where we arrive. In the journey toward the horizon, the only place we take steps is here, the ground on which we stand, amid the eddies of the Watercourse Way.

The struggle with our own inner feelings, beliefs and judgments about how things ought to be amid the “isness” flow of the Watercourse Way, is akin to swimming against the stream.