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The Stack №14
This month: the trick is also the treat
Hello,
Welcome to the 14th edition of The Stack — a monthly collection of thoughts, books, and practices for living deliberately.
This month’s reflections:
- coexisting opposites
- books I read this past month
- a discussion of meaning and interrelationships
- a poem on the perception of reality
The Idea
The good and the bad are usually separated. One group is “the good” and one is “the bad.”
And that makes sense to us. It helps us categorize the world and live in it comfortably.
But the more I read, and the more I think about the nature of reality, the harder it becomes to separate these categories so neatly. Good and evil, joy and suffering, gratitude and grief often exist within the same experience. Perhaps the unsettling reality isn’t that the opposites are identical, but that they are often inseparable.
So when it comes to this time of year, one can take the same attitude towards Thanksgiving. It’s a season of gratitude, and one often reflects on all of what there is to be grateful for. But in our modern times we are also confronted with the complicated history of the holiday. And sometimes, in…
