So my doctor's appointment was a total bust. I went there and discovered that through some error he had been double booked. The other person was a lot younger than me and had come from farther so I gave him the appointment and rescheduled for tomorrow. I think they'll have to take me off this mood stabilizer. I've been really cranky and have been fast-cycling through moods on it.
Anyway, I was reading The Trouble With Being Born today (at the doctor's office while I waited for my non-appointment). There was a passage that I thought some people reading this might appreciate:
This is the crucial, perhaps the sole question we should ask ourselves when we scrutinize anything, especially a thinker. There is never too great a distinction made between those who have paid for the tiniest step toward knowledge and those, incomparably more numerous, who have received a convenient, indifferent knowledge, a knowledge without ordeals.
When Mara, the Tempter, tries to supplant the Buddha, the latter says, among other things: "By what right do you claim to rule over men and the universe? Have you suffered for knowledge?"
If Cioran is right, I suppose I must be doing OK because I've had a couple of “ordeals” and whatever knowledge I have seems to have been aquired painfully (not that I'm complaining).
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