Note on consistency

I am a man of many moods.  Sometimes I’m up, sometimes down.  I’m usually chasing something, except when I am sitting still and staring at the wall.  I can think of nothing drearier than making a concerted effort to always agree with myself, and remember who I was yesterday.  I am most reliable when I predict I will be unreliable. I do have a Lambda, but sometimes I am still looking for crawfish in the creek or envying a lazy hawk gliding in the air.

Although: I’m not a Californian: no, I am not that gone.

I am merely curious.  There’s always something off in the distance, or staring back at me from my belly button.

This, of course, is my dog speaking.

But why not some Emerson, too? 

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Am I great?  Most days I’m an idiot, but I think I do have some good moments.  Perhaps: “to be genuinely curious is to be misunderstood”.  Curiosity takes you off firm ground, and sends you you know not where.  As Emerson says, implicitly, most people worry more about how they are perceived than how they are perceiving.  This is pure silliness, and perhaps the deep root of most of the world’s ills.