Beyond Order

But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master

People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak by those around them.

not whether you win or lose. It’s how you play the game!”7 How should you play, to be that most desirable of players?

We are dormant adventurers, lovers, leaders, artists, and rebels, but need to discover that we are all those things by seeing the reflection of such patterns in dramatic and literary form

We learn to see and act in the manner of the heroes of the stories that captivate us. These stories call to capacities that lie deep within our nature but might still never develop without that call.

We can even generalize such imitative acts, catching the “spirit” of what or whom we are observing, and producing new ways of seeing and acting that are in some manner similar to that spirit

We can watch the actions of a living creature, animal or human, and then imitate them, translating our perceptions of their movement into new movements of our own

We can watch the actions of a living creature, animal or human, and then imitate them, translating our perceptions of their movement into new movements of our own. We

Even complex and intelligent mammals such as chimpanzees and dolphins tend to repeat their species-typical behaviors generation after generation, with very little change. Humans, by contrast, can and continually do seek out and encounter what is new, investigate and adapt to it, and make it part of themselves.

our tendency to sacrifice ourselves
unsuitably and unjustly to predatory others