Feeding My Ignorance

Helping is difficult - we have all seen the joke about the boy scout helping the old woman across the road - with the denouement that she didn't actually want to cross it in the first place.  In 'real life' not only do we find situations exactly analogous to that, but we also find that the 'old woman' simply resents the fact that she had to be helped.

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Are there any endings that we really want to happen?  Even the best endings - the climax of a wonderful piece of music, the last page of a rivetting book - leave us in some way 'sad'.  When we have been enjoying something good, the fact that it has ended will - no matter how much pleasure it has afforded us - inevitably bring with it at least a tinge of disappointment.  Indeed it may well be the case that the better the thing is, the more we feel a "loss" at its conclusion.

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Wouldn't it be awful if we knew!  Yes, there are some things that we can say will (almost certainly) happen - but for the most part tomorrow is a mystery - and all of our tomorrows after that!  I may be wrong, but if we knew everything that was ever going to happen in advance it would take all the fun out of each and every experience.

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Yep - this is a word I had never seen before as well - yes - perhaps that is a reflection on my 'ignorance' as testified by the title of the blog, since Eudaimonia is, in fact, the highest ideal for a good life according to Aristotle.

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It is past time that I wrote something which is about a topic separate from my current medical issues!!  Otherwise it might seem like that is the only thing on my mind - which is far from the truth.  OK - it does tend to dominate - particularly at some times during the cycle - but there are plenty of other things occupying my mind.

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In the 18th Century Benjamin Franklin famously said that "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes" - many of us go through much of our life paying much attention to taxes, but paying scant attention to death.

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When I started writing these blog entries I had no idea what the precise nature of the content would be - in some cases it was a subject matter that has occupied my thoughts for a long time; in some it was something that I felt I needed to just understand my own thoughts; and in some - like this one - the subject matter is something that I just did not expect!!

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In the two previous posts, The Red Thread and Making Connections,  I wrote about the connections we have with other people and how there seems to often be an inexplicably strong connection to some - manifesting itself in the way that our lives constantly intertwine.  Typical of this is, of course, family connections - these are to be expected.  It is inevitable that we interact with other members of our family - even if that is only at births, marriages and funerals!!

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Some of my earliest blog entries dealt with some thoughts of mine about friends - closeness of friendship and the fact that there are just a few people in anyone's life who become intricately entwined in that life.  As my ideas are developing in that area (and in all other areas of course) it now strikes me that fundamental to the friendships are connections - and this also sits well with my later amendment that whilst I started out talking about friends the 'closeness' attribute also applied to enemies!

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Have you ever really thought about why people make connections with others?  It is both natural and mysterious - why connect with Person A, but not with person B?  Certainly some of this is down to 'circumstances' - we will make connections (good or bad) with people that we share a close space with - at work, at school, in church, or wherever.  There is, however, more to it than that.

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