Love is what is most important, but sometimes we need to be selfish, and even cruel.
It is important to never waste time, but sometimes the most important thing IS to waste time.
You should dedicate yourself to helping others, but the first other is always you.
There are no absolutes, except when there are.
I have in recent days been trying, again, to puzzle out a life philosophy. When I look out at the world, I see many solutions. And I see many people driven mad by a felt need to conform to absolute dictates of one sort or another.
Life, it seems to me, is a tide: it comes in and it goes out. What was becomes what is, becomes what will be. There is no constant landscape, other than motion.
As a shelter from this, many humans have evolved inflexible rules, such as the Jewish and Islamic laws, or the Catholic liturgy. Communism is little but an escape from freedom by assigning “law” to “history”.
Sometimes we need absolute rules. But sometimes we don’t.
And the philosopher–if I might style myself as such, my own reservations about that word and vocation notwithstanding–should see the big picture. Sometimes, emotionally, you need to be firm, and obviously you must be firm in something. This is rigidity. This is Law.
But sometimes it is necessary to bend like the Taoist willow, allowing, without losing ones roots.
In some respects, I think I am trying to wrestle with my own tendency to be judgemental. It was a functional adaptation at one time. I needed it. It was the only way I could make sense of the world.
But what I see is that it separates me from most of humanity. All have fallen in some ways, but all have also risen in some ways, and found some light somewhere. For me to be tense, to force a separation, is a violence to truth, and more than a little unfair to me myself. When I push someone away emotionally, I lose what could have been an interesting interaction, potentially useful to both of us.