It is not the critic who counts; not the man who
points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds
could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and
blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and
again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but
who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms,
the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at
the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who
at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so
that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who
neither know victory nor defeat.
Before I forget to document them, I want to write down some good books I've been reading. Fire Logic, Laurie Marks Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks Moghul Buffet, Cheryl Benard 10% Human: How Your Bodies Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness, Alanna Collen Back in Control: A spine surgeon's roadmap out of chronic pain, David Hanscom, MD
Gandhi the Man:How one man changed himself to change the world, Eknath Easwaran
I recently read a very thought-provoking book titled Songs of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult. It is a story about trauma told in the five voices of five different main characters including four who interweave to tell the story chronologically and one who starts at the conclusion and tells the story in reverse chronological order until she gets to the beginning of the timeline while everyone else's narrative is concluding. I haven't really digested it all. Hearing the story from five people's perspective, one in reverse, is fascinating as is the theme of unresolved trauma. Perhaps all trauma remains at some level unresolved. Perhaps that's what makes it traumatic- our very lack of ability to digest it completely or to fully understand each other or ourselves in it. Listening to these five characters struggling to understand themselves and engage with each other exposed them- their vulnerabilities, their hopes, their griefs, their best attempts at living well. This is a book which I will want to read again.