yep ….
Category: Personal
solitude
What’s the best way to deal with negative thoughts?
Know thyself! Ever person is gloriously different. So knowing yourself is a good first step to dealing with negative thoughts. For me, it is solitude. Not isolation. But real solitude. The difference? Solitude is rejoicing in who is present, isolation is who is absent. I do not do random!
This solitude puts all my thoughts into context. And those present are the context. So …
reading
What do you love now, that you hated when you were younger?
Reading!! I hated reading in school – I had better things to do. But now it is almost exclusively what I do. I would not think of leaving the house without a book. And I often dream about the books I am reading. So …
freedom and devotion
I am watching the documentary on Gloriavale Christian Community. The title is interesting, Devotion: Obedience or Betrayal. Cults interest me!
Let me start by saying that I have no idea of their theology. I did look at their website and (big tick from me) they are KJV only. And, yes, there are bad people among them. But there are bad people everywhere! I do not have the numbers (and taking the moral outrage out of it): are they, for example, statistically worse than your average sports club? Maybe the issue is expectation?!
So my first take: there is a lot of talk about freedom in the second episode, Sins of the Father, centering on mind control (taking an individuals freedom by cohesion) and brainwashing Of course, no person would willingly join! Or would they? The assumption is that people in any cult are irrational and shown the error of their ways would leave. (This, of course, simply ends in battling authorities.) Yet, what I see are people who are completely committed to their understanding of the Christian life.
So, I wonder, in complete freedom, can an individual surrender that freedom to someone else?
loyalty over gut
What’s a time you followed your gut and it turned out to be exactly right?
The truth is I have valued loyalty over my gut instinct. When something or someone feels wrong, I want to remain loyal. I trust the other more than I trust me. The other, after all, is better than me!!!
Maybe another way is that I tend to preach being proactive but I live react!?
make it so
Emperor Palpatine has announced open elections for a new Emperor — and he’s nominated Darth Vader. You get to nominate one challenger.
in love
What’s something you used to believe as a kid that seems ridiculous now?
This might sound cynical or jaded: I believed in love. But life has taught me that what we call love is often more about being useful. Maybe love exists but not for me.
internet!?
What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?
I am so old that I remember life before TV, telephones (that is, landline), and the internet. I remember the excitement of a colour TV and our first landline phone. My parents had a typewriter that I used as a little boy.
So maybe the internet? It opened ideas and the writings of individual people. It allowed me to connect with people from all over and exchange views and life-experiences. It opened the world beyond my small part of it.
movie quote
My first thought, “how do they know where I am going?” (If you know, you know.)
fiction?! Yep!!
If you could change the ending of any book, which one would it be?
A little strange but …
The ending of Dan Brown’s Demons and Angles is terrible. It actually made me laugh out loud. (If you know, you know!) I normally enjoy Brown’s books, and I enjoyed Demons and Angles, but the ending is just plain weird and does not make sense in the context of the book.
a fool and his prayer book 