Tag: hope
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Things Don’t Change Unless Something Changes Them
It’s one of those things that seems so obvious that we don’t think about it. But it’s also true: things don’t change unless something changes them. The rock that you see today will be the same forever, unless (as is likely to happen) wind, water, people, and other entropic forces eventually change that rock. This is…
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The Difference Between Optimism and Delusion
Optimism has a bit of a rap against it. Too many people, my former self included, cast aside optimism as a sane perspective on life because they’re making a simple and obvious mistake: conflating optimistic delusion with optimism itself. I raise this not to make the pedantic linguistic point — I assure you I refer to no dictionaries. Nor…
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On Dreaming Your Dreams
One of the hardest things I’ve learned in my life is that dreaming doesn’t make it so. This sounds so self-evidently true that you’d think I never needed to learn it. But I knew it, and sometimes still know it, only intellectually. What’s needed to really grow and mature and become the person you want…
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Be Your Own Protagonist
jquiz I was walking past a bus stop about a year ago, and there in front of the bench (which was all this bus stop consisted of) was a blue graffito. I saw that it was blue, that it was clearly made with a stencil, and I kept walking. When I actually realized what I’d…
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Kenya and International Impotence
DEMOSH The world recently celebrated a rather unceremonious “monthiversary.” Kenya–which up until a month ago was often described as the brightest spot in East Africa, if not the whole continent–is still in chaos. See some of the haunting reports and photographs of The Vigilante Journalist if you doubt that fact. A month ago Kenya’s president,…